Is history repeating itself? (Casual Gamers)

[Sullla]

mrstickball said:
Casuals can and will lose interest.

The question is, how long will it take? In the case of the NES, they ended up buying the NES in droves, then fizzled out on the SNES (12m less units sold of the SNES than the NES).

IMO, the Wii's casual 'novelty' appeal will probably last for most of the generation. The Wii lifespan will probably be 2 generations. Wii one will do great, start to falter, and then Wii2 is launched, that re-invigorates the Wii franchises, but doesn't reach the predicessors total sales.

I'm sorry, mrstickball, but you're wrong. The casuals never went away; or, to be more accurate, the ones that left were replaced by new ones. Yes, SNES sales were lower than NES ones, but that's because half of the casual market switched over to the Genesis/Megadrive in the fourth generation. Instead of Mario and Duck Hunt, the new casual games were Sonic, Mortal Kombat and the first versions of Madden. SNES and Genesis sales combined were substantially higher than NES sales, close to 80 million together. In the next generation after that, most of the casual fans were on the Playstation, then on the PS2.

The gaming market is only going to get bigger from the Wii, not shrink. I'm just not following your logic on this one.