@underlined. But I thought I said happy medium in a later post. I'm not talking about bleeding edge, I'm just talking about a more HW competitive Wii. And even though Nintendo wasn't as good at appealing to the market that Microsoft appealed to, at least if they offered something they could have picked up some of the scraps. The Nintendo core I talked about in the 15m core on the Nintendo console, those are the NinCore. I'm talking about the traditional core that migrated onto the PS platform during the SNES exodus and that grew and later split-migrated to the 360 during the PS3 launch fail.

As for offering those kinds of exclusives, Retro could easily have replaced DKCR with a tradcore title and it wouldn't have hindered any of Nintendo's output.

You can say they are the undisputed winner, but most will not agree with you. They are the winner, that's not being disputed, but they're not the Undisputed winner, meaning people can still claim certain things against the victory. For example, that the HD twins combined sold more than the Wii. The PS2 was therefore a stronger winner, as was the DS. The Wii did not win in the red ocean market, that's something the PS2 pulled off. The Wii won off of the casual market, which does not hold as much respect where the debate matters.

A lot of people had been waiting a long time for a new DKC game, and when it turned up, it was arguably the best 2D platformer of its generation. Ignoring that it was developed by Retro, it is the wrong game to focus on in this way, because taking something at the peak of its genre out of the lineup is only going to hinder things.

You don't look to replace the best with something of "similar" quality. You look to replace the weak with better.

I never said the opposite, but I understand that the term blue ocean may have led you to think that's what I meant. No, in fact I'm well aware that a good portion of PS2's were sold due to casual offerings and some were sold as dvd players, so your post is not newsto me. But good point.

And yes, MS and Sony shared the rest of the gamers, eg what ITT Icalled the red ocean.

To highlight, in OP, I mentioned that MS won Sony's red ocean and Nintendo didn't. I limited my piece to that and made no mention of Sony's blue ocean with the PS2.

Let's take this a bit further, now for my understanding, the PS2 was the Red Ocean.  People considered the Wii "Blue Ocean" cause they were trying to create a new fanbase but was it really?  The Wii, 360, PS3 just shared the PS2's fanbase, I actually believe the 360 did a better job at expanding the market this gen, but that's another discussion.  Or am I just misunderstanding the terms here?

Yeah, the PS2 was primarily Red Ocean, but a good majority of its perpetuating sales (legs) and the sales of casual titles would lead us to believe that non-gamers bought the console as late adopters, and casuals bought the PS2 as the go-to platform for atypical video games, like games that appeal to girls, older folks and other more experimental projects not targetted at the tradcore audience. That part was blue ocean because there was only a sinch of competition from Nintendo's gamecube in that market.

The Wii was almost purely blue ocean. It not only snagged PS2's non-loyal casual market, but it also expanded the non-gamer market by reaching out to more folks by releasing games that appeal in a very powerful way to people who don't naturally play or are not naturally attracted to video games (eg. girls, women, the elderly). So it's part discovered blue ocean, part expanded blue ocean, but in both cases there is no or little competition.

How much of this is the case though?  Mind you, we'll never know.  But I still firmly believe that the Wii didn't expand the market as much as people think.  I personally think that the Wii was and still is in the Red Ocean.

The question then would be, how much non-gamer/casual to tradcore ratio was there with the PS2. If you think it's 100m, or in that vicinity, then the Wii not expanding the market would hold water to a certain degree.

However, Wii Sports had a very different appeal than most PS2 non-gamer/casual games, and that game sold 80m worldwide. So just that proves that the Wii expanded the market because with Wii Sports alone, which had a very distinct charm and appeal than most PS2 casual games, sold as much as 80m. So it's hard to argue that Nintendo didn't expand the blue ocean.

Add to this that the 360 and the PS3 sold together (not including move and kinect) some 117m or something like that. So it's hard to see so much of that be expanded market. If 90m of that is tradcore, then the PS2's non-gamer/casual total would be some 60m.

But for the Wii to be in the red ocean within the casual/non-gamer space, there would need to be another competitor. And at the time where Nintendo nabbed the crown, Sony was out of the ocean. So it was still blue ocean. But here I would agree with you if you said a more effective term should exist to describe this form of competition, where one grabs the spoils where another leaves off.

See that's the thing, I do think it's around 100 million.  100 exactly?  no, 80+, yes.

Okay, but then how much of the HD twin total do you attribute to tradcore? Without kinect+move the total sales are 119m (just recalculated). So how much of that was for tradcore?

70+ million.