I don't think casuals have moved away from the Wii. Some may have moved to the Kinect, but Wii still has a massive casual audience. Even if the Wii U fails to achieve the Wii's success, its gonna do just fine thanks to some Nintendo IPs.

The 3DS hasn't failed at all, its audience is primarily casual.

I'm not sure if you've really thought this through.

I never knew they lost them.

^.^ yup. They want the mix now. Half chocolate and half vanilla.

I feel the Wii-U will be the healthiest console next gen. You can quote me on that.

Or just third party support, which appears to be lacking (even though it is better than Wii). Sony lost many exlcuisves this gen and they did alright against microsoft (note I have filtered out first and second part games in this equation as each console has their own).

This is so true, but I think I've finally wrapped my head around the issue. For me the amount of time people play games with is irrelevant; all it means is that  maybe they buy 4 games a year instead of 6, or like me buy 6 but never get round to playing the last 2 games lol. To me this has nothing to do with casual/core.

Now people sometimes claim that there are tons of gamers who play the likes of COD who should be considered casuals. I think a better way to describe this group is "uninformed gamers". These is a broad category and I think is pretty self explanatory; regardless of their taste (whether like playing COD, Fifa, Assasins creed or Wii Fit/kinect sports) these are gamers who only know about the massively popular titles, the kind that are swayed by marketing campaigns and the type that have probably never been on a site like this. A perfect example is one of friends who plays Need for Speed all day but when i asked him if he has Little Big Planet he said he'd never heard of it( this 2 years ago).

Now I don't think Nintendo will have too much of a problem with a fair portion of "informed gamers" as they'll be enticed by the 1st party titles and maybe a few good 3rd party exclusives or even multiplatform games which just work much better on the Wii U. I think like the wii it will becoming a secondary console of choice once its lowerd in price. I can't really see how it will appeal to the uniformed crowd beyond people addicted to Mario. Possibly it will be the console of choice for people picking up a system for their kids and that could be big, just look at the 3DS.

The Wii version of Just Dance 3, released last year, has sold over 9.5 million copies to date. It's the best-selling third-party game on Wii. Skyward Sword, released about a month and a half later, has sold under 3.5 million copies to date, just over half its predecessor's (Twilight Princess) LTD sales.

Mario Party 9, released this year, has sold about 550k in America. Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story, both released this year in NA, have combined for about 420k sales in the region.

I don't know why people insist on believing that Nintendo has lost the "casual" audience, unless they're the sort of people who consider Zelda, Xenoblade, and The Last Story "casual" experiences. Because it's pretty clear to me that the games traditionally considered "casual" are still selling quite well on Wii. At least, they're certainly selling better than the games traditionally considered "core," which makes it pretty clear to me which audience has actually abandoned the Wii.

The so-called 'core' audience (or the closest thing nintendo has had to one in the past)are still more likely to pick up a wii u than the fickle casual crowd though, cause they tend to care more about things like new hardware/new NINTENDO hardware/ new iterations of their favourite franchises etc than the common folk.
I'm a lifelong nintendo fanboy, wasn't exactlyblown away by the wii and still I've got my wii u preordered...cos that's what we do...

I'm not going to argue if Mario is casual or not. The fact is Mario games appeal mostly to audiences considered casual.

The target audiences is people want to play Mario, Zelda, Pokemon and other Nintendo IPs. It's gonna see a big boost in Japan when it gets games like Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, and Pokemon.

So the target audience is pretty much the same as the original DS.

Imo the WiiU is a Nintendo fan dream console but aside from them it'll be very difficult to repeat the success from the Wii with casuals.

Now they have competition the motion area and a fierce competition in the core area. I will never buy a WiiU because most games I play are multi and some exclusives. There are also game types I can't go without that are not very popular with Nintendo like car sims and wrpgs. Now I see casuals playing with tablets/phones/kinect more and more and justifying another console that does only one thing is beoming more and more difficult.

Release the hounds! I mean Wii U Sports and Wii U Fit.