I think you meant to say that the core is nowhere near insatiable, though as your wording stands there I would agree with it.

But yes, gaming was for everyone when it first came out. It had to be: there was no market to speak of, core or otherwise, and so there was no choice but to make games with mass appeal in the hopes of catching a few demographics on which a market could be built. Likewise, gaming was for everyone when the NES was released: the crash of the early 1980s killed the market, and so there was no choice but to rebuild, and that meant going back to gaming for everyone. And now it is occurring again, as I outlined in previous posts.

Why did this happen? How did we go from the PS1/PS2 era of fratcore dominance to another crash? I don't know for sure, but I think it's telling that the crash is coming roughly 25-30 years -a human generation- after the previous one. My hypothesis is that the doom of the fratcore was its own obsession with so-called "mature content": supposedly a hallmark of what they call hardcore gaming. But time waits for no one, and the fratcore are growing up. There comes a point when they must by necessity grow disillusioned with M-rated games, once they get a taste of what maturity really is, but by that point they've grown so averse to "kiddy" games (i.e. anything that doesn't carry an M rating) that from their perspective nothing is left in gaming for them, and so most of them leave.

In a market where they didn't dominate, this wouldn't be as much of a problem, because there's always going to be some churn: people leave, people enter. But the fratcore dominated the market so strongly that they basically controlled most of the big games that came out, not to mention the atmosphere of online communities and game stores, all of which most other demographics found repellent. End result: new gamers haven't been coming in fast enough to replace the disillusioned ex-fratcore. And so the market contracts overall, and with three companies competing for their attention, a crash is the only possible result.

Basically, all Nintendo did this gen was to predict another crash and go into rebuilding mode. To do otherwise would have been suicide for them: unlike Sony and Microsoft, gaming is all Nintendo does, and so if the market goes then Nintendo goes with it. This was a major risk on their part -if they'd been wrong it could have sapped pretty much everything that remained of Nintendo's fanbase- but their prediction was virtually spot-on, and so it worked beautifully.

lol the whole problem with this era is console price. It has nothing to do with "fratcore" or "hardcore" gaming.
devs are getting shafted because nobody is buying the "fratcore" games.
Nobody is buying the "fratcore" games because not enough people own the systems which they are on.
Because when Wii was released both MS and Sony were still flirting with 400-600$ consoles, although they each had cheaper versions.
Even now, in a recession the ps3 is 400$. This is the highest price for a console 2 years after debut in a long time. Other consoles at that price fizzled, but both ms and sony have had 400$ systems this gen.
This isn't an era of casual gaming, its a era of casual spending.

As such, I disagree that Nintendo predicted that the other consoles would cost 400$.

Im a Casual Gamer , so im happy with Nintendo

There is a fairly large group within the "Core" of every console's userbase which can not be satisfied no matter how hard you try ...

This is a problem because, even though this "Core" demographic demands more and more games, they don't (necessarily) buy more games when you meet their demands. This can be demonstrated by looking at how long lists of games are created on message boards explaining how one system's line-up is so much better than another system's line-up, and by the end of the year the typical gamer who made that list will have bought between 4 and 8 of those games.

Basically, a company can meet the demands of their userbase by ensuring that 24 to 48 good games are released for their system across a wide variety of genres, while the "Core" userbase would look at a line-up of 100 great games and be disapointed because another platform had 102 great games.

In an interview from another post she couldn't name 5

is anyone actuaslly gunna respond to what i said in the topic?

too many people are misinterpretting this argument.people seem to think that wii fit is nintendo's core game. what she actually said was that they dint divide games into core and causal because the core can enjoy casual game (and obviously casual can enjoy core games) therefore they are not mutually exclusive.

nothing will get resolved in this thread woopah because everyone's opinion is the only one that counts here.

if only things did get resolved that would be cool, i just wish people would realie that causal/core is a scale, not 2 seperate categories. thats the wya nintendo se eit anyway and i agree

that's how i see it too.

However, some of these scales are larger smaller or shifted, so there will always be discrepancies.

How much of that is because (as you assume) there aren't 5 games and how much of that is because she is afraid of the backlash that would happen if she mentioned a game you wouldn't approve of? Realistically, if she included Shawn White's Snowboarding, Animal Crossing, Wario Land Shake It, Mario Kart or several other fun games with a broad appeal as being great games people should play there would be dozens of threads on this forum (and Nintendo would receive thousands of emails) about how disapointed people were that Nintendo had given-up on games like Super Mario Galaxy and the Legend of Zelda.