http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10609&Itemid=59

 By Tom Ivan

Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive VP of sales and marketing, told attendees at the Electronic Gaming Summit that 79 percent of Wii players are male, the majority older than 18 years of age with an income of $50,000 plus, and that more than half of them game for over five hours a week, reports Kotaku.

Dunaway said that the people who buy Wii tend to be pretty typical gamers, but that the other household members who end up playing the system aren't. Almost half of secondary household members who play Wii are female, with around 38 percent aged 25 or older. The majority of these players play games for at least two hours a week, but only a third of them play for five or more hours each week.

"The real breakthrough, the real magic of the Wii console, is that it brought new consumers into the game," Dunaway said. “At Nintendo we definitely believe in the power of the expanded audience.”

According to a separate Kotaku report, she also said that around 50 million Wii games had been purchased since the system launched, breaking the record of 42 million PS2 games sold during the Sony system’s first year and a half of availability. The Wii software sales figure doesn’t include copies of Wii Sports bundled with Wii systems.

"While we appreciate the impact the PlayStation 2 had on sales and the industry, perhaps we are even more impactful," Dunaway said.

I definately fit the catetegory of the typical Wii gamer. And my wife as the secondary gamer. Although, she plays more than 5 hours a week.

Anyway, i'm really excited in waiting all the flaming and crying this thread is going be full of.

i fit the bill too and so does my gf as the secondary gamer. however, the wii my mom and dad bought is definetly a very casual system - wii sports, wii play, and soon to have wii fit.

Whats with the hardcore casual thing? Cant all of the existing gamers should be just gamers? Because all in all gamers do the same thing anyway, play games.

I think everyone here who owns a wii is pretty much "hardcore"

We need some hardcore music to go along with our awesomely hardcore attitudes!

I love how Kotaku went ape yesterday. Wow, what a horrible day on that site. Even the guys who run the site got involved. Hopefully people realize that a game is a game and it doesn't matter much more then that. Who cares if one person likes one type of game and another likes another type. I never see people get this upset over movies.

Personally, I have been saying for quite a long time that "Hard-Core" and "Casual" were bad ways to classify gamers. One of the biggest problems is they're trying to combine (at least) two very different things into one classification; essentially, they're trying to combine how dedicated someone is towards gaming as well as their game preferences into one classification.

Now, Nintendo's statistics do not surprise me because one of the main reasons I have seen people buy the Wii is many gamers are using the Wii to play videogames with people who are not gamers. As an example, last week I brought Boom Blox over to my brothers and my mother actually played with us; the last videogame she played was duck hunt when the NES came out. The Wii has seen break out sales because of this because people who are not (typically) gamers and people who wouldn't buy a videogame system so early in its life are rushing out to buy a Wii because "finally" videogames are fun.

Well for Wii..
The cap between casual and hardgore gamer is shortened compared to other consoles.
I see myself a hardgore gamer..

i think Nintendo policy is very good..Casual players buy lot of "casual games" but they also might buy hardgore games which both ways is a good thing

Sweet. I am hardcore.

I think this press release is for Nintendo to convince ITSELF that that's what they are doing.

I'm a core gamer, and I bought the Wii and while my household uses it, I don't believe that's the case everywhere. For example, I've convinced many many family and friends who don't usually play video games to buy the Wii, and I think that's what happens usually, core gamers convincing non-core gamers. Since the later is a much bigger group of people, I'd say that most purchases tend to come from casuals that were recommended by the core.