I understand what you're saying but why give up on your customers without a fight?  Why let them drift away or be poached by other hardware companies?  Nintendo has the talent, and even if they don't, they have the money to invest in new studios.  The could easily set up a new division, something like Sony's Naughty Dog, which would still be wholely owned and published by Nintendo, just with a different name credited as developers.  Even more simple than that, they could purchase a quality third party developer.  They could do this easily.  Market research, talent, and lots of funding can create a hit.

All I can figure is that they would rather not.  I don't know if they're arrogant or fearful of tarnishing the Nintendo brand but they've so far declined what we all know they could accomplish.

Let's imagine that the Powers that Be at Nintendo did put their collective efforts to such a task.  Let's say that they developed a new IP something along the lines of Mass Effect, Dead Space, or BioShock, something with a quality storyline, interesting characters, and gameplay that is both fun and challenging.  How big could that be for Nintendo in their effort to convince the core market to consider a Wii U?  I think it would be huge, a big slice of instant street cred.  It would effectively tell core gamers that, hey, we have Mario, Zelda, AND this game with aliens and/or monsters that you can destroy while still being engaged on more complex levels.  Meanwhile, most parents would never associate the last game with Nintendo directly.

I see nothing to lose from such a move and a LOT to gain.  Who knows, considering some of the moves they've made already, they might be doing something along those lines already.

Sometimes I wish they bought out THQ and leveraged Jason Rubin's talent.

@happydolphin. I dont see retro making FPSs or something like conker, and 3rd parties, thats not Ninty, it would be a ninty published game, but it wouldnt be MADE by nintendo, I dont see it.

honestly, nintendo didn't really capture the casuals that appeared on the ps2.  look at the numbers.  ps2 is around 155M while the ps360 is around 140M and still selling.  wii didn't take away the ps2's causuals, the 360 did if anything.

what the wii did was create a different breed of casual, an expanded marketplace.  my mother for instance.  since before i was born she had a video game console in her house thanks to me and my brother and she never played it.  she and always told me games were a waste.  ...yet she bought the wii.  

there is no way you are going to convience me that ps1/2 gamers that choose not nintendo in ealier generations suddenly changed their mind about mario, zelda, mariokart, metroid, paper mario, smash brothers and all the rest of nintendo's typical first party line up.  and that is what is reflected in the kinds of sales wii had compared to ps360.  

the gamers on the wii had very different tastes then gamers on the ps360.  that is inherit because the ps360 gamers are primarily carry-overs from previous gens and wii gamers were primarily the nintendo faithful and newcomers that finally found something they wanted in wii sport when nothing the industry ever created before was of interest to them.

You specifically mentioned advertisement. You're just trying to spin your argument. Nintendo cant possibly target Halo fans as they are Xbox fans, wich by definition dont purchase Nintendo consoles (bar ocasional exceptions). You dont know how marketing works, apologies if it seems like i overeacted, but you're just giving excuse for more ignorance on the concepts and that really is annoying.

And if your case is what you're saying in this post, your thread title and poll are still wrong.

Nintendo does not suck at marketing their more mature titles, they still see decent sales and get praise for the games. They might suck at advertising them, wich was the fair point you made on your original post.

As for the personal attacks /golfclap.

You win bro.

But I meant marketing.

Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. 

Key concepts:

Product marketing, Pricing, Distribution, Service Retail, Brand management, Account-based marketing, Ethics Effectiveness, Research, Segmentation, Strategy, Activation, Management Dominance, Marketing operations

Nintendo fails on almost all fronts for their older-teen blockbusters.

And @underlined. OP already mentioned I was talking about reaching an audience they don't have (eg xbox fans). If MS could snag PS fans, I don't see why couldn't Nintendo snag xbox or ps fans.

You should golfclap yourself, honestly, because if you were less arrogant, I wouldn't react to you that way.

Retro was just an example, and what makes you think they can't make FPS'? Metroid prime is pretty much the closest thing you can get to be an FPS that's not an FPS. Nintendo bought SK just 1 year before the gamecube launched, so nothing other than choice is stopping from taking that strategy with another company like say THQ.

As for having 3rd parties as contractors, it wouldn't matter whether it's made by Nintendo or not. All that would matter is that it's owned by Nintendo, by contract. Much like say Art Academy wasn't fully made by Nintendo, but it belongs to them. I don't have any better examples on hand but I know it exists.

The actual question of OP is, were they to have a blockbuster in the works for the older-teen crowd (the most obvious solution to their woes in that market), would they be able to market it properly so it could reach its market sales potential, much like Ubi manages almost every time with its posterboy games.

I'm pretty sure I answered this already.

If others could do it, why couldn't Nintendo? If Nintendo failed to do it with the cube, it goes to show that they were doing something terribly wrong. Again, I'll point you back to OP, and of course other factors, such as the choice of developer (Silicon Knights) or the choice of content.

As a reminder, Goldeneye 007 sold 8m units on the N64. It was rated M.

So you're telling me that non-gamers and casuals played "babyz" and barbie on the 360? Nah, I'm not buying it.

bold is not what I was saying. I'm saying that the Wii Sports, Wii Series (which are neither of the games you mentioned there) attracted almost the entirety of the casual market and non-gamer market.

Then, the remainder which may not have been attracted by those offerings, were attracted by the 3rd party offerings that fed off of that market, and reached the other casuals/non-gamers. As such, the Wii took all of PS2's casual market, attracted more, and the 360 shared in a bit of Nintendo's new market.

It's the wrong answer to you, but it's the correct answer to me. It's compounded by the fact that Halo was a lauch game, so no need to build any market, the game was properly marketed so as to yield that result.

Nintendo is well capable of advertising the hell out of a launch game catering to that market, as well as marketing the hell out of something like the Wii when it first came out. So that point is moot.

Now assuming they did the obvious and properly target that audience, the problem of reluctance people have from choosing their game would be thwarted by proper marketing. It's all in the image, and Nintendo figured that out for Wii, why haven't they figured it out for the older-teen market? Answer: They have a corporate and mass mental blockage on that front. They need consultants to help them understand that market and how to cater to it. THEY HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO! And it's no coincidence that the big winners are western companies.

As for underlined, tell my how what they had was not profitable. As far as I'm concerned, the poor profit yield overall was not due to their SW strategy, but due to their hardware strategy. The onus is on you to provide the numbers for your shady claim, nevermind Sony I know what happened there it's the PS3's pricetag. How in the world was the xbox not profitable, pre-Kinect? I have no reason to think that the xbox was not profitable to Microsoft. They went after the Wii audience because there was money there, just like Nintendo should try to SUCCEED at aiming their market because there is money there too.

OP YOU ARE WRONG.

Nintendo do not suck at marketing these titles, because the fact is they don't market them at all. Therefore their performance cannot be measured.

So you're telling me they didn't market a) Metroid Prime? They didn't market b) F-Zero GX?

I know a) is false. If b) is true, then how could they think we didn't want it if they didn't even try to market it?

Your memory has a funny way of re-writing itself. I didn't dismiss it, I acknowledged it, and attributed alot of its success to the fact that it rode the wave of the Wii launch craze. I'll add to that the name "Twilight" was coincidentally part of a craze at the same time, as well.

Apparently I haven't... I have no idea what makes you say that. You do realize I lead the VGStockz thread, and one of the main topics lately is THQ's demise. To say that it works for all companies clearly wasn't my point as I'm aware of that, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the western companies that ARE selling big are thriving. (Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard). Nintendo is a big-boy, it's not Midway, it's not Acclaim, it's not THQ. They have more money, and could leverage talent, as well as market effectively. The point of OP is to show that they don't know HOW to do it, and the cube proved that.

@bold. That didn't happen for the PS2. We know there's a threshold that was reasonable, within which that doesn't happen.

Also, the PS3 had the brand power in its advantage, they didn't HAVE to go with the cell in any way.

And as far as I know, the PS3 is no longer deep in the red, you're going to have to support your claims with numbers and links at this point because this is getting silly.

If Sony did it wrong with the PS3, does that mean that the older-teen market in and of itself is not viable? Nah, I don't buy that kind of thinking. Cell was not needed, that blows the argument out of the water. A reasonable piece of next gen HW would have done the trick.

All this to say that the market is viable, as the PS2 showed, and that Nintendo sucks at targetting it, that's the point. The day Nintendo will make a blockbuster for that segment and market it like AC, and the game fails, is the day I will shut my mouth.