The casual audience that drove the Wii's massive levels of success has a very short attention span
This gets thrown around, but I’ve never actually seen any data or logic behind it, probably because it originates from console warriors so butthurt over the Wii sales, they had to dismiss it as a fad and entirely the work of casual gamers.
In actuality, the system had stellar software attach rates, record-breaking software sales across all of Nintendo’s franchises, casual and hardcore, and hit the triple digit club (DS, GB, PS2, and PS4 being the only others), all over a long six year span.
That doesn’t sound solely like casual gamers rushing out for a fad. That sounds like the creation of a brand, and a loyal audience. A fad would be the majority of the players hitting the bricks after Wii Sports, and maybe Wii Fit, yet the data shows that didn’t happen.
The only thing observable, negatively, is that once hit games for the Wii slowed to a trickle, sales slowed down. That once Nintendo replaced it with an entirely different concept, everyone went home and stopped caring.
Which, yeah.
Nobody really knows what would have happened if Nintendo had followed up with a system that built on the Wii’s design ethos, rather than destroying it, but signs point to a much, much healthier system than the Wii U, at worst.
Wii U flopped because the marketing was atrocious. Nintendo took a sledgehammer to it because all of that audience had moved on to Kinect or Move or smartphones. Why play Just Dance in jaggy 480p when you can play it the same way in HD? There was nothing more those controllers offered where the comeptitors hadn't surpassed. Now the trends have moved on and those kinds of controllers are only reserved for a few casual experiences and exercise games.
Kinect. Now that’s a fad. What did it have, one holiday season, maybe two of success?
That’s because the tech was there (sort of), but the games weren’t. The appeal of the Wii was always that 1-2 (3?) punch of cool controls/ease of use, and Nintendo games (which typically were full, actual games, as opposed to the Kinect).
With that in mind, Kinect took nothing. The Wii USP was still there.
On smartphones, there’s no indication that they would have affected Nintendo in the console space, delivering full-featured games on the TV and in the living room. People who make this argument are taking Nintendo’s self-destruction of their own market, and attributing it to fan-fiction.
It’s possible that the markets could have competed to some extent, but we never really got the chance to find out, did we?
It’s also again dependent on this idea that Wii served only as Senior and Casual’s first console, which we can see isn’t true with traditional games like Super Mario Galaxy selling over 10 million units. The system had a wide reach of all types of gamers, from Xbox/PS fans buying a second system, to lapsed old-school Nintendo fans, to casuals.