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Forums - Nintendo - Who exactly was Nintendo's primary target audience with the Wii U?

 

Who was the Wii U's main audience?

Casuals 44 13.75%
 
Hardcore 28 8.75%
 
Both 64 20.00%
 
They didn't know who they wanted 147 45.94%
 
Yo Mama 37 11.56%
 
Total:320
etking on 08 May 2016

The Wii-U had no target audience, that is the main reason why it failed. But a smaller 7" tablet controller and a Wii Sports HD game as launch title would have made a very huge difference.



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archer9234 on 08 May 2016

I know they wanted the Hardcore back. But they wanted the Casuals too. So they kept the name and made a iPad. It was more casual intended. But when that went out the window. The hardcore hat, came on.



bigtakilla on 08 May 2016
archer9234 said:

I know they wanted the Hardcore back. But they wanted the Casuals too. So they kept the name and made a iPad. It was more casual intended. But when that went out the window. The hardcore hat, came on.

Being able to play games off the tv is one of the single best innovations for hardcore gamer s with families.



baloofarsan on 08 May 2016

All of them (Nintendo, MS, Sony) targeted the same audience. Let's take a look what was trending the years before the start of this generation:
iPad was big and getting bigger. Siri was the new big thing on iOS.
So Wii U and DS4 has touchpads. MS settled with motion and voice controlls instead.

Motion controlls were big.
Just Dance sold more than ten million, Fitness games sold well (Wii Fit Plus over 20 million) To capture this audience, mostly girls - a "new" customer segment, would be a golden opportunity.

TV was becoming a thing for young people with streaming services and popular TV series (and sports). Apple TV had a slow start but others, with Googles Chromecast as the biggest contender, saw a market and so did Nintendo (TVii) and MS.

VR/AR was coming.
Nintendo missed this one but Sony was ready (always on light bar) and MS had the Hololens hidden in the basement.

Always online was a fact for all electronic devices. Steam was were games were going.
Nintendo improved their online and their eShop and brought Miiverse. Streaming was the sollution for Sony and MS had the power of "the cloud". It just turned out that game consoles was the only electronic gadget that was NOT going to be always online, at least according to angry forum dwellers.

Pachter and other analysts predicted the end of cosoles as we know them.



JRPGfan on 08 May 2016

I would like to see Nintendo focus less on party type games....and local multiplayer aspects.
Those mario party games, animal crossing board game? who cares honestly? I certainly dont.

(seriously nintendo, screw the casual market, those soccor moms, that buy the console and maybe 2 games... they re not dependable the way a core gamer is)



If nintendo wants to appeal to the "core" gamer, they would do some more shooters (fps/3rd) (like splatoons), and get back to doing 3D mario games (64,sunshine,galaxy style) platformers. Then throw in alot of rpgs, put Pokemon on a home console, new Xenoblades, new paper mario (thats actually a rpg please),...

Small things like this, would get nintendo back to selling well I think.



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Wavebeam72 on 08 May 2016
Ganoncrotch said:
The kind of gamer who is perfectly fine with sitting down with a console which had less internal storage available to games than my N-Gage had but they countered that by not daring release games for it at a rate where you might need to have more than 1-2 of them installed and updated at the same time.

Also in terms of power they seen that the main rival in terms of power for the Wii was the PS3 and Xbox360 so they designed the console to be marginally more powerful than those systems (in some aspects, not harddrive again QQ) was just a shame that the X1 and PS4 were coming around the corner with upgrades for 3rd party games such as 16x more RAM under the hood than their older brothers, basically instantly murdering the idea of easy ports to the Wii-U of games directed at the Core gamers they hoped for.

And finally it was aimed at people who would be fine to just sit and wait while they fumbled about, a 2015 with less than 20 seconds of the Wii-U Zelda game shown, a 2016 with the sad news that game isn't coming til mar 2017 and even then... the Wii-U will be the inferior place to play the thing, a sequel to the 3DS handheld Mario Title.... A Toad game! a 3 year in the making reboot/remake of Lylat Wars,

Damn... this got ranty, I think for me the Wii-U itself was not the issue in terms of Power/Gamepad though, I think the number 1 issue which happened to the Wii-U was Nintendo simply were not able to support a HD console, the jump to designing worlds with assets over 480p clearly dealt them a major knock and if the NX is going to be a true 1080p system I think unless there is major changes... or recruitment going on at Nintendo, expecting it to have anything other than a trickle of games is foolhardy.

(Unless it ends up having that 3ds cartridge port rumour which was going around the place and on day one it literally allows you to play the entire 3ds library on the big screen possibly with tidied up AA added everywhere to keep the image bearable on the big screens, that would be one amazing library on day 1 of a console.)



TL:DR - Ninty failed at HD games, utterly failed.

The above post was made by a generic brainless hater and for generic brainless haters.

Soundwave said:
Magnus said:
I have no idea what were they thinking with the Wii U. I would love for the people at Nintendo to explain what the thought process was.

Nintendo makes great games, I basically just appreciate them for that.

As far as a corporate entity ... they went batshit insane years ago. It's a bunch of clueless old Japanese farts on their board of directors hilariously trying to cope with a business that's basically Western teenagers/adults. It's kind of like your grandma trying to pick out what clothes you should wear.

It's probably better if you can seperate Nintendo the game maker from Nintendo the corporation. One is very good at what they do, the other is exceedingly incompetent.

And the nonsense never stops.



freebs2 on 08 May 2016
JRPGfan said:

I would like to see Nintendo focus less on party type games....and local multiplayer aspects.
Those mario party games, animal crossing board game? who cares honestly? I certainly dont.

(seriously nintendo, screw the casual market, those soccor moms, that buy the console and maybe 2 games... they re not dependable the way a core gamer is)



If nintendo wants to appeal to the "core" gamer, they would do some more shooters (fps/3rd) (like splatoons), and get back to doing 3D mario games (64,sunshine,galaxy style) platformers. Then throw in alot of rpgs, put Pokemon on a home console, new Xenoblades, new paper mario (thats actually a rpg please),...

Small things like this, would get nintendo back to selling well I think.

I agree they could use some more fps and rpg games, also they should bring back classic 3D mario games.

I don't agree they should abandon local multiplayer, on the contrary I belive they should valorize it even  more than ever and blend it in a more effective way with online multiplayer. On the other hand I agree they should abandon (or resize) are party games and, speaking more generally, local multiplayer games without deep game mechanics (those games are not particulary liked and not particulary needed). Local multiplayer is been an essential part of their home console's offereng for over 2 decades, and it is the only field where they stil have a true competitive advantage over Sony and Microsoft.



oniyide on 08 May 2016
Magnus said:
Soundwave said:

Nintendo makes great games, I basically just appreciate them for that.

As far as a corporate entity ... they went batshit insane years ago. It's a bunch of clueless old Japanese farts on their board of directors hilariously trying to cope with a business that's basically Western teenagers/adults. It's kind of like your grandma trying to pick out what clothes you should wear.

It's probably better if you can seperate Nintendo the game maker from Nintendo the corporation. One is very good at what they do, the other is exceedingly incompetent.

But Nintendo the game maker IS Nintendo the corporation. And even a clueless old fart can't possibly be as stupid as to think casuals would want a controller that looks like a tablet but has none of the functionality of the tablet.

you said it yourself, the GAME maker part is great. But ill say when it comes to the actual hardware, there not so hot in that department, thats why we get things like wii pad and for innovative as the wiimote was, it worked like crap



oniyide on 08 May 2016
bigtakilla said:
Soundwave said:

Well there are different definitions of success, is making money part of being successful? Because if you're going to go through the whole bit of trouble of making a platform, spending millions marketing it, etc. etc. I mean this whole business model was invented so that the reward for putting up with that headache was that you got (tada!) licensing fees. For the hassle of developing/designing/marketing/distributing a console, the console maker can enjoy being paid licensing fees from developers. This is kind of an important part of the video game business.

Even if Nintendo isn't the no.1 juggernaut in the business, lets say instead of the 4-5 retail third party games Nintendo gets now on the Wii U/year, they got a more healthy 50/year (this is still a small number compared to Sony/MS which get several hundred third party games per year).

OK, now lets even assume these games don't sell terribly well, lets say on average a pretty shitty 70,000 copies WW. That's not great, but it's something. Lets assume Nintendo collects an $8 licensing fee on each one of those games. 50 titles x 70,000 copies x $8. That's $280 million/year. That's ... not an insigificant amount of money.

That's why you want at least a decent amount of third party support on your platform even if you're not exactly beating Sony for third party king or whatever all or nothing trophy. And the wonderful thing about this is Nintendo gets paid on any retail game no matter what. That ill-advised copy of Carrot Top Fitness? Guess what? Nintendo gets $8 of every single one of those stuck in a Wal-Mart clearance bin whether it ever sells or not.

I suspect also that a large part of Nintendo's future rests largely with Microsoft. What is Microsoft going to do in the future, do they double down on the XBox consoles or do they move out of the console space and give Nintendo some breathing room/oppurtunity?

I also think it's imperative that NX be a platform, not a fixed singular console or handheld, if its a fixed piece of hardware then yes what happened to the Wii U will inevitably probably happen to the NX where people won't support it because it's basically a generation late. If it's an evolving ecosystem with upgradable or evolving hardware, then that's a bit of a different ball game, then Sony can't simply go "where here's PS4.5 or PS5" because Nintendo in effect has made the hardware dick waving contest somewhat irrelevant, it would be like a car maker bragging about having air conditioning as a feature.

And yet, a LOT of the more popular 3rd party games (such assassin's  creed and COD) sold well over 70,000 and they decided it wasn't really worth their time and effort to port newer games. Why would it be any different for NX?

Well over 70,000 for those series isnt very good



mountaindewslave on 08 May 2016

they seemed to have no idea who they wanted :O it certainly wasn't for the oldschool hardcore Nintendo fans, as we want a regular controller with no motion or screen gimmick

the weird controller makes me think it was aimed at casuals, but then again casuals who just grab a controller and play probably wouldn't want a screen on their controller either

Its a mix of the two. Nintendo was hoping to pull in casuals with a gimmick (tablet screen controller, controller still having some motion controls) and I suppose sort of ignored the hardcore fans.

a common misconception is that mega serious gamers are going to want MORE accessories and options (i.e. things that supposedly advance an experience). unfortunately that's not really true and the Gamepad does NOT need a screen. Its far too big.

 

at any rate the Wii U is just a mess conceptually. Its like in between a gimmick and reasonable usable. It says a lot that a tonnn of Wii U owners swap in the Pro Controller when applicable and available to be used (depending on title), and that Nintendo even released a special Smash Bros. 'Gamecube' controller for the Wii U

the Wii U doesn't add up for any users. And in the end that shows, based on sales it seems the only people who bought the Wii U are die hard Nintendo fans. which on one hand is kind of sad, but on the other (as a positive) it does seem to indicate that there are quiteeee a few NIntendo fans who will stick with them regardless of the crap conceptualized by the big N

I love Nintendo but I sincerely hope they go back to the basics for the NX. The 3DS has been solid, easy and pick up and use. their home console should be the same in terms of accessibility