Which "casual era" was worse, Nintendo's E3 08, or Microsoft's Kinect years (2009-2013)?

[Wman1996]

Salnax said:

The Wii had a relative dud year following E3 2008, but audiences had just gotten biog entries in most of Nintendo's biggest franchises over the prior 18 months, and things were looking up within a year. It was a bad year, but not unparalleled. 2003 and 2016 come to mind.

The Kinect era featured Xbox trying to completely rebuild itself around a peripheral, crippling the brand to the extent where it has never recovered. Various studios were created or revamped to create Kinect games, and at least a dozen retail Kinect-only games and twice as many digital titles were released by Microsoft from 2010 to 2014. When the X1 was released, the forced inclusion of Kinect added $100 to the price and gave the PS4 an instant advantage. This is not counting the various other games that had to spend time adding Kinect support instead of other features.

E3 2008 hurt the Wii. Kinect crippled the Xbox brand.

Yes and yes. On the first-party front, Nintendo had a disproportionately heavy pre-E3 lineup for Wii in 2008.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl and especially Mario Kart Wii were huge. Wii Fit (which had released in Japan in December 2007 and other regions before E3 in 2008) may have been almost exclusively for casuals or nongamers, but it sold like crazy. 

After that, I think it was just Wii Music, Wario Land, Mario Super Sluggers, and Animal Crossing in global releases. Only Animal Crossing had another installment after 2008 of those IPs. Animal Crossing: City Folk was viewed as playing it safe compared to the previous entries and sold much less than Wild World did on DS. New Leaf would even end up selling better despite 3DS having a lower hardware total than Wii. 

On Wii, 2009 was also quiet until around May-June (the inverse of 2008). After Wii had such a strong first-party lineup from November 2006-April 2008, it seemed to go on a break from May 2008-until around May or June 2009 (Punch-Out or Wii Sports Resort as the return to form, if you will). 

There were obviously third-party games on Wii to enjoy, but it doesn't instill confidence for a console that was still selling like hotcakes to have pretty much an entire year in a row that was quiet in first-party games after about a year-and-a-half of notable releases.

In all fairness, Switch had a very strong 2017 (March-December) in first-party titles, while it took until about October-November 2018 for the Nintendo software to pick up again. 

Some of the philosophies of Wii and E3 2008 did end up hurting Wii and Wii U. But Switch is a meteoric success. 

Kinect as you said ended up crippling Xbox. Xbox has still never fully recovered from the Xbox 360 to Xbox One transition (where Kinect was pushed big time for Xbox One and initially bundled which raised the price) and Xbox is now just one part of a more successful Microsoft Gaming division. Some employees even said it's tough to think of it as Xbox, it's Microsoft Gaming. 

One other thing I will mention in this long post is PlayStation. E3 2006 was a fail on the PS3 front. PS3 struggled until the Slim revision in the second half of 2009. Sony was very arrogant, packing a ton of tech into PS3 at a high price. PlayStation has recovered from those early days of PS3 (they already did late in the PS3's life, or at least by the early life of PS4) but a lot of damage was done.