its cheaper and easier to please casuals. You mention how many games that hardcore gamers buy, but you dont mention the cost to produce those games and the actual profit they bring in, along with the risk of failure. I could be wrong but casual games that succeed cost far less to make, and tend to sell far more than hardcore games that succeed, and when they fail they dont fail so bad to put people out of business.

Another good example as to why having the industry focus inward on elite consumers is a bad idea is the American Comic Book industry. Comic books *never* recovered from the great crash of 95-96, which is why both of the big two publishers are owned by larger multimedia corporations, who largely use them as licensing vehicles and where the comics themselves are basically "legacy" products, which are kept around just 'cuz

What caused the crash? An excessive focus on "collectors."

Casual gamers are way harder to please than the so-called hardcore. If you stop developing games for them they will immediately start looking for other alternatives and they won't come back. That's what happened to Nintendo, they abandoned them and now no matter what Nintendo does they won't be coming back, it is already too late. With hardcore gamers everything is easier, just promise them one or two big core games and they will get hyped and forget everything, it has already happened with that Monolith JRPG announced some weeks ago.

Edit: I overlooked RolStoppable post saying the same I just write, now my message is redundant :p

nintendo makes shit loads off of their hardware. just imagine, 100 million Wii's all sold at profit, and 150 million DS's all sold at profit. THEY PRINT MONEY. WiiU has been the exception of the rule for nintendo when it comes to releasing a console and it not being profitable right away

Um...I think I might want to hear more on this Anime industry crash.

3DS was not profitable aswell.

GC as well.

@OP

Ignoring any segment of the market to focus on just one market is folly.

It hasn't crashed *yet,* but much of the signs are there. The major anime production companies depend more and more upon the otaku market to make their productions worthwhile, in that they're more focused on selling super-high-priced Blu-Ray sets, figurines, and other stuff. To that end, they make these series more specifically to cater to the otaku crowd, thus leading to the proliferation of the moe blob and harem series, because the demands of the otaku lead to a product that does not have mass appeal. Eventually, this stigmatized market will shrink and collapse upon itself.

So it is in the game industry, where often the demands of the "core" lead to creating something fundamentally unappealing to the layperson.

Remember: industries don't have to recover from crashes. American comic books never did.