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zorg1000 said:
most of them were casuals like i described a few posts back. "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." are you really pretending that people who bought a Wii for one game then never played again were the majority of Wii owners? sorry but they werent |
Even Nintendo themselves dileneates games by using terms like core and casual, look at the recent interview with Koizumi and Takahashi, he basically states Zelda is for core players, 1,2 Switch is for casuals. Everyone here who knows this industry knows basically what is meant by "casual".
It's someone who doesn't have a big pre-existing interest in video games, doesn't play much on a daily basis, isn't even able to play most games with any real modern complexity, gaming is not a big part of their life, etc. etc. etc.
A teenager who can hold his own in Call of Duty and NBA 2K is not a casual player. He simply likes the more popular games of the day, that doesn't mean he can't play something like ... Nier or some more niche style of game, he/she just doesn't want to on the basis of taste.
The Wii is dead. And it's never happening again. Nintendo can't even get that audience, which has been cannibalized by smartphones/tablets to pay even $10 for a 2D Mario game anymore, even with a $0 hardware cost. Because iOS/Android has co-opted that audience and changed what they value gaming as to basically nothing but free. They expect nothing but free games now, won't even pay a $1-$2 for most games.
We're seeing that with 1,2 Switch which is not really taking off in a big way with the audience that Wii Sports/Fit, or even stuff like Carnival Games or Just Dance scored big with. It's selling about on par with Nintendo Land in Japan (a bit worse actually), and we know Nintendo Land took the Wii U nowhere.
Switch has to create it's own legacy, we need to just let the Wii brand (which includes Wii U) just stay dead. It's dead for a good reason. I'd argue Switch is much better off focusing on core gamers (as in people who already play complex games and like to play a lot of them) is actually a market for that and excitement within that market for Switch. Nintendo have no idea what casuals want anymore, their only huge breakout success with casuals since 2009 (going on 8 years now) has been Pokemon Go, probably largely because they had nothing to do with it.
