Couldn't the same be said about most videogames?

@mibuokami: I'm not gonna spin anything since I never played these games... Sure there are some very shallow games on the Wii, the same as happens on the PC or PS2 or any high-selling platform.

Chess is as HardCore as it gets.

Little big planet is both hardcore and casual depending on the players desire to create or just play and the level that's created- which is one of the reasons it's so cool.

I made a fun chess and checkers game board in little big planet- If you have the game and want to play these games with a freind online or copy it and play at home the levels are named "chess" and "checkers" by kungfuian.

@NJ5

Lets establish a few things here:

1) Do you agree that sex, voilence and overall visceral media attract a particular group of people? (ie: male teenagers and young adult)? The media certainly agree, everything from Hollywood to Comic.

2) At the NES era, games are considered for young children and the average age of a gamer was certainly younger than today.

3) Sega were the first to recongise that gamers were growing up, they were the innovators of the 16bit era and were not afraid to introduce controversy such as an uncensored version of Mortal Kombat (SNES version was censored, a by now accepted Nintendo policy). They appeal to the same audience that originally owned the NES but have since grown up.

4) Sony set the tune of the video game industry for the past 2 generation, their target audience have always been '18' in a broad assumption that everyone wants to be 18. They established a pattern with the PS1 that was emulated by just about every (none nintendo) system since. When you target a group of audience for that long and all the major games coming out are aimed at them and them alone, I think its fair for the audience to consider themselve 'gamers'

5) The wii has come! It has great innovative games, great alternative games but... where is the violence? were is the sex? were is the raw visceral appeal that have long been a gamer's domain? The wii is not an attractive console for many young teen and adult because it lacks the above.

Who are these new people that the wii is catering for? certainly not gamers! We afterall are the TRUE gamers and these newcomers are nothing more than hanger on!

We are 'hardcore' and they are 'casual'

QED (I hope)

note: hope the sarcasm in the last two paragraph came through. :p

@mibuokami: I think the part we may not agree on is where you imply that the audience for these violent/etc games is the same one as it gets older. That is of course partly true, but as you can see in this site, the current teenagers are very interested in these games too, while the Wii is capturing many of the older gamers (although of course people here often own more than one console, which rarely happens in the market as a whole according to NPD).

This is my impression and it may be wrong, but I don't see the so called "hardcore" audience being a more or less fixed group of people, it's very much fluid.

What "theories"? A large number of them dropped the pretense a while back and are open about their anti-Wii biases now.

Yes it IS fluid! But has not been fluid for the PS1-2 era. The wii is the first console to change the perspective of what is a 'hardcore' gamer because its the first console to have a shifting target audience.

I don't think the Wii only has the so called casuals as its target audience... It's a console aimed at everyone, and Nintendo's game offering supports this.

As for what most third parties think the target audience is, that's another story of course... But things are getting better in this camp, and the party-games market is getting saturated so we'll have to see more creativity from the 3rd parties who wish to make sustainable profit from the Wii.

A lot of people don’t realize that a lot of “New” gamers Nintendo has attracted with the Wii and Nintendo DS have been playing videogames for a very long time, and many of these gamers have just been underserved by an industry which has never paid too much attention to them.

My sister is one of these gamers, and (like me) she started playing videogames with the Colecovision and grew up playing videogames. In the 1990s the shift towards 3D graphics killed off a lot of her favourite genres on home consoles and the PC and, even though she still played the occasional home console game, she mostly became a handheld gamer. The Wii is (in a lot of ways) a throwback to older times and as a result she has picked up gaming on a console on a whole new level.