^You're devolving into mysticism here... "allure"? "direction"?
Good software and nicely designed easy hardware and an accessible familiar image covers the final user experience.
Price, retail and distribution support can be catered by MS as well as by Nintendo.

My mother will call an "iPod" any MP3 player and doesn't care about the difference really. Even though Apple certainly knows design and how to market for a certain crowd she isn't a part of. She knows she has to put the earbuds on and press play. People called "Walkman" any portable cassette player, even though it was originally Sony's and it was trademarked.

Stop thinking like an experienced, niche gamer: for you the Wii has a philosophy, has features, has a library. It comes from Nintendo so you know what games to expect on it, and it has undertones of nostalgia and allure. You're one that knows and cares about the difference between an MP3 player and an iPod.
For most people of the widened audience the Wii is that appliance they need to buy to play tennis with their kids or to do those funny stepping exercises. Like the toaster is the kitchen appliance you need if you want toasts.

The day they'll see enough TV advertising of a different toaster, and the nice employee will demonstrate for them at the shop that toaster of a different brand - that for the same price also makes waffles - they might buy the latter.

In other words the trouble for Nintendo will come when the catchphrase "only on Nintendo Wii" will be emptied of its current value. Easy come, easy go.

They can certainly be copied successfully, I don't disagree with that. Microsoft can and will enter the new market. What I disagree with was your assertion that proper software support isn't needed. I think the evidence goes against that. Even if you exclude Wii Sports Wii's attach rate is nearly the same as PS3, though both are below X360. And then you look at what has sold, on the million list yes there are mini-games that did well(with many more that fell flat) but there are also games like SSB:B, Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda: TP etc. among others that have sold very very well in their own right. These are top sellers, so I don't think you can claim they're unimportant.

^SMG, Zelda, SSBB are important, but for the other Wii audience. The audience of the core gamers: those are the games I play on my Wii. But who considers the Wii a Wiifit appliance and has 4 games doesn't own Zelda for sure.

Actually look at those sales numbers: I think we could almost _define_ the core Nintendo gamers component out of the whole of Wii owners as those who bought Zelda:TP.

That means there are a little more than 5M of them (sum them to the GC Z:TP sales and you basically got the Z:OOT sales, meaning that the inner core of Nintendo gaming hasn't expanded significantly since the N64 times). They actually will be a bit more because some core gamers might have bought Z:TP for the GC at the time, then upgraded to a Wii later, so they are between 5 and 8 million.

A little more numerous are the sales of SSBB and SMG, about 8M each. Assuming that most Nintendo core gamers also buy SMG and SSBB, we have less than 3M of each of those games were bought by the remaining 43-40M Wii owners, ie at best 1 every 12 of them, but more probably around 1.5M/41.5M or about 1 every 29.
As you can see they are bought by the widened audience (it's games with Mario in them that everybody says are great, after all!), but in a _very_ minor fashion.

I stick to my point that what they own in an overwhelming majority, are those games I mentioned in my previous posts. Performing the same calculation on Mario Kart Wii for example says that even if all the core gamers bought one, the other 41.5M would still have bought around 8.5M copies, or 1 in 5... a very good attach ratio.

WereKitten is right about one thing for sure. There is definitely a divide even within the Wii segment of the market. I for one would be a core nintendo gamer who happens to have a Wii for the core games only.

I would suggest its less than 5-8 million though because I suspect quite a few of the core nintendo gamers also like the wii fit, wii music, wii sports stuff.

That's ridiculous. You're assuming a 100% attach rate for Zelda for core gamers on Wii to make your claims.

Those games are important to the expanded audience for two reasons, because it was never going to enter the lives of the expanded audience unless there were gaming enthusiasts excited about it in the first place, word of mouth is the biggest marketer for Wii and someone had to start that. If XBox fans can't get excited over the X-mote, who are going to be the pioneers?

Secondly, aside from Zelda those games are important because they are in fact emblematic of the new generation. They are "arcade" games. They have the same values as all the "casual" games on Wii, they are pick up and play, social games. I think it's ridiculous to assert that these games are only bought by the core.

The software support is needed because in truth the Blue Ocean is not a bunch of homogeneous soccer moms. They have a wide variety of tastes just like the core market, and a wide variety of games have made million sellers and near million sellers to reflect that.

I'm not assuming a 100% attach rate: I'm defining the "nintendo core gamers" on Wii as those who bought Z:TP on Wii or GC :) But seriously, how many Nintendo diehard fans you know that did not buy Zelda nor SMG? Because both point to a core audience of 5-8M people.
I think my artificial definition and any empirical one will overlap for like 90% And as such the numbers that come out don't change much, nor does the conclusion that there is a very scarce penetration of "core" games in the widened audience. Please point me to the logical step that you think is blatantly wrong.

Aside from Zelda, as I said probably only Mario Kart transcended the divide. It's a pick up and play game as you said. SMG and SSBB probably are not accessible enough.

But seriously, how many core XBox fans don't own Halo 3? Loads. I certainly don't own either of those Nintendo games, and yes I know many others. You could say that I have no statistical proof, anecdotal evidence, but do you have statistical evidence that all or most of the core Wii audience buys Z:TP?

^There might be a trouble with the terms here. For my definitions if you don't own Z:TP nor SMG, you're not a "core Nintendo gamer", though you might be a "hardcore gamer" that owns a Wii.

For my numbers I expect a "core Nintendo gamer" to buy the vast majority of the "hardcore" first party titles. I think you will agree that there's a strong brand loyalty so that such an audience will exist. In other words I expect first party title sales to be much more correlated for Nintendo than for Sony or Microsoft, and that the sales of Z:TP and SMG give us the estimation of this audience size.
This is one of my hypotesis, for which I have no proof but that I think is very reasonable.
The fact that you're not in this group doesn't change the numbers: each "hardcore" game you bought is one less that was bought a by really casual Wii owner.

I would suggest a core xbox fan is severely different than a core nintendo fan.  I would suggest there is no such comparable thing anyway.

The point is that buying zelda is what makes that person most likely a core nintendo fan which falls in the 5-8 million category. A major difference when compared to the "core wii audience" which as some have already suggested is a misnomer.  There is no core wii audience unless you are suggesting the entire 50 million wii owners are the core.

The point is the people who stuck with nintendo through the years for their zelda and mario fix are the core nintendo fan and not necessarily part of the new expanded audience.  I believe this is a seperate segment within the wii audience as I am a part of this smaller segement.  I still like mario, zelda, metroid games but will have nothing at all to do with wii sports, music, fit or any of the other million shovelware games.

I don't think it's reasonable to divide such a large number of people into strict groups. Demographics are ok, but they're usually broad groups with 'tendancies'. However, you are using a particular game as some sort of metric for core Nintendo fans. Unless you had something to compare like with like with, I don't think that's possible. You'd have to show another game with a demonstrably similar 'core attach rate', and give sufficient reason for why Twilight Princess should follow the same pattern.