You seem to be convinced that Nintendo (or consoles in general) are simply incapable of competing for the casual space -- that not only is it lost, that the loss was inevitable.
I don't really agree. I agree that the market has been lost, but that doesn't mean the loss was inevitable, just that Nintendo (and Sony and Microsoft) were not smart enough competitors to figure out how to win it.
I didn't said Nintendo lost the casual crowd, actually the opposite, they managed to get and secure them.
Yes, Nintendo made huge profits thanks to the casual crowd they chose to be Wii's primary audience. But Wii did lost steam on his lifetime and it wasn't because they didn't manage to secure the casual crowd like you said, but exactly because they managed to secure the casual crowd. Core audience isn't interested in casual games, so they left Wii and got a "Console for casuals" stereotype. Nintendo did follow this direction and pretty much all third-parties supporting it did the same. But like I said and you acknowledged, a casual-mostly userbase is unstable and they aren't regular buyers. They can buy millions of copies of a game and anything else, turning the userbase restrictive in the eyes of third-parties. This is why Wii got a sales's decline in it's late life and third-parties started to shaft it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to make casual games, it's actually good and can bring profits, like Nintendo managed with Wii, but not the way Nintendo by creating a scenario where it's userbase became mostly made by casuals, turning it restrictive.
Again, going after casuals is certainly harder than going after "hardcore" gamers. That I agree with. But it's also significantly more lucrative for the winners. I'm not saying there is a right strategy here; safe-but-less-profitable, risky-but-more-profitable are both paths with their obvious strong suits. Instead, I'm saying: 1) that going after casuals isn't obvious stupid or mistaken, and 2) Nintendo may end up losing out on both markets by trying to capture them both simultaneously.
Microsoft managed to bring casuals for Xbox 360 as well thanks to the Kinect, Sony didn't because Move was pretty much a Wiimote clone and Nintendo already secured this audience for themselves. Kinect on the other hand was very different and caught the attention of the casual crowd, hence games like Dance Central, Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports got good sales.
The difference is that Microsoft managed to bring the casuals and keep the core audience strong. Something Nintendo didn't managed it.
