Nope. I got more good Nintendo games on Wii than I got for Gamecube. Just because Nintendo added a ton of casual stuff to the hardcore stuff does not make it bad at all.

People might say "but Nintendo could have focused on hardcore games instead of Wii sports resort" etc etc but in what Universe does e.g.a Wii Sports game have the same development time or need the same amount of money to produce as one of Nintendo's top IPs?

I got 2 Mario games compared to GCs 1. I also got a Sin and Punishment (which basically is StarFox wihtout ArWings) I got a Metroid Prime game. I also got a Paper Mario game (even tho that was was meh). I also got Fire Emblem and Battalion Wars, Smash and Mario Kart. I got 2 Zelda games (1 was a port tho). There is Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandoras Tower etc etc.

I see all the Wii "insert word" games as an addition to all the typical Nintendo games. I would also have loved to get more god-tier games with exploration and story etc instead of "prototypes" or "minigame collections" but I cannot complain when I compare Wii to Gamecube.

Nintendo's mistake was not to go for the casuals it was for not knowing what to do with them once they got them to buy a Wii.

Another mistake was letting third party force them to make the "seal of quality" useless.   If the seal would still be in use (the original use) then we would not have gotten all the 20mb flash game crap software  burned on disks and then sold at retail.

Honestly, no.

I don't think that going after the casual market is a bad thing inherently. So long as you have the excitement or power to back that up. Nintendo could easily grab the casual market because it was a local multiplayer family friendly console already. It was merely playing to its strengths, and got a wider audience for more and more consumers.

I'd say that Nintendo's problems lie in expecting that to happen again with the Wii U.

If the Wii taught us anything, it's that people get bored of innovations quickly and want to go to a state of efficiency. Late games showed the lack of interest in waggling the remote and focused more on just pressing the buttons (like NSMB, for example or how many people play Smash Brawl with GameCube controllers).

With people already bored of moving their stick backwards and forwards and ready to move on, the best decision would've been to move on with them. Instead, Nintendo kept pushing the Wii schtick along and the people who already weren't interested simply went on to other things like smartphone apps and tablets.

I think Nintendo's going to either need to innovate the shit out of their next console or get a hard-hitting line-up of new and exciting games rather than pushing out games we've been playing since the 90s.

He is right. Nintendo stopped supporting the Wii a long time ago, and even during its peak quality software releases were few and far between. That is the reason why the casuals moved on to either smartphone games, no games or other console games.

Going after casuals is not a bad strategy, but they went after non-gamers, who ended up having no interest in a newer console, so didn't buy the next nintendo homeconsole.

Edit : All casuals didn't move mobile. COD and sports games still sell very well.

Short version: The wii was the BEST decision Nintendo could make, the WiiU was the WORST decision Nintendo could make. Their games are pretty sweet though.

No, they moved to tablets because Miyamoto has long wanted to seperate the system from the TV, he had talked about that idea for years.

Wrong, it had nothing to do with paying for $60 games or paying $300, if the games had been compelling, and on good hardware, people would have wanted it.

But the gamepad is not a good device for games, nor is Nintendoland anything like Wii sports, its a bunch of nintento themed mini-games, not a sports based game with no real nintendo theme.

Sports games have much more appeal than minigames and the Nintendo theme was not what the expanded audience wanted.

As for NSMB WiiU, it was a rehash of NSMB Wii which itself was not anything new or special (NSMB wii succeeded because people had been hungry for a 2D mario, after that hunger was somewhat satiated, Nintendo had to be innovative with the next one they failed), where was the interesting worlds to explore, the wide assortment of playable characters and the great music.

It wasn't there, it was clear that Nintendo wasn't interested in reaching the expanded audience, and the words for people such as Miyamoto have confirmed this.  They want to make what they want to make, not what the expanded audience wants.

Sports game players aren't casuals. I buy many games every year at full price ($70), more than most of you, but I also buy FIFA every 2 years.

I think the mistake was the Wii U.

They should have embraced what they had achieved. Release a console in 2010-11, call it Wii Too and add improved motion controls, perhaps with a camera. It wouldn't have sold as well as the Wii, but I'm pretty sure it would have sold much, much better than Wii U.

Yes, they just went after a market that abandoned them for mobile phones. Now the hardcore gaming market simply doesn't even sees them as competitors.

These aren't necessarily casual games. I play Killzone Shadow Fan with a clan and most guys there play Battlefield, CoD, Destiny and so on, since the first iteration and are pretty good at shooters. The same can be said about sports games. Just because they play mainly a genre, they aren't casuals. A high class competitve DOTA player is a casual because he mainly play MOBAs? A EVO world champion is a casual because he basically plays KOF, SF and Tekken?