| zorg1000 said: i think alot of people on this site dont understand what a "casual" gamer is. its the 8 year old boy who plays Minecraft & Skylanders. the 12 year old girl who plays Just Dance & Style Savvy. the 19 year old college kid who plays Call of Duty or FIFA with his roommates after class. the mom who plays Mario Kart to bond with her kids. the the lapsed gamer who doesnt play nearly as much as they used to because of work/family/etc but still plays occasionally to wind down and relax. and yes its the grandma who plays Wii Fit to try getting in shape. all the comments like, "Switch cant sell Wii numbers without a Wii Sports level success", just dont make sense. what a device needs in order to be a "casual" hit is to have an accessible/convenient concept with an effective marketing/advertising campaign, a price point that the market finds acceptable for what the device offers and a steady flow of software that appeals to multiple demographics. whether or not Switch meets all these criteria and will be a huge success remains to be seen but considering that 3DS+Wii U will reach 85 million while not hitting all those critera than i dont think 100 million is out of the question. |
"The 12 year old girl who plays Just Dance and Style Savvy" - OK well that crowd has diminished significantly. Also why can't we have dilenations, I'm sorry but the 19 year old playing Call of Duty sure as hell is fucking different from the soccer mom that plays Mario Kart once a month for 15 minutes. These are not the same audience.
You need to have a Wii Sports driver to have Wii type success I'm sorry but accessibility + marketing alone does not do it, every platform has "casual" games by your definition and smartphones are much easier and cheaper to play/use than Switch is (more accessible).
There's no way the Wii would've sold 100 million without Wii Sports/Fit.
It's like saying you can be a supermodel without being good looking ... yeah maybe I guess, I would say maybe look into a different profession.
Switch is finding success appealling to core gamers and that's fine. Doesn't mean it has to sell like the Wii either, the Wii overall IMO was not a success that people make it out to be because Nintendo was not able to iterate on such an unreliable audience base. So they had short term success but long term basically have nothing to show for it as that audience abandoned them when they could get their hands on free games on their phones/tablets. If you're only going to have an audience for 4 years and then they ditch you, that's not a sustainable business model in this industry.
If Switch sells "only" 70 million but has a more reliable fan base that doesn't bail out like the Wii Sports/Fit crowd did for Switch future iterations, then an arguement can be made in the long run really which approach was more successful. I'd rather have 70 million that I know will be back for my next system than 100 million where 85 million of them bail out because they got tired of mini-games for $50.
