Mmm, I disagree. They were convinced you need to create those games to create NEW customers and that the industry couldn't expand if it was just the current customers. They're thinking was that as games and consoles got more complex, the barrier to entry naturally got higher and they needed a way to ease in new people.
Regardless, despite what people in this thread keep saying, it was never their main focus. Simply listing their "causal" and more traditional games for the Wii would show that the traditional titles far outnumbered the casual ones
I don't think we disagree as much as you think we do. If you aren't bringing in new people to play your more complex games, you are eventually going to run out of people. Hence, my point about the audience eventually drying up.
I also agree that it definitely wasn't their main focus. But given that it didn't really wind up bieng their main focus on Wii (and continues to not be their focus at all on Wii U), I don't see why they're so bitter about the audience not coming back.
Typically one would think the biggest audience would actually be treated like the core audience. To use a historical example, games like SMB and Zelda, which were the biggest hits on NES, became Nintendo's "core" titles, despite being the relative equivalent of "casual games" compared to other titles on the market at the time. That didn't mean other, more "hardcore" titles weren't being made - it just meant that they weren't the all-important flagship games.
After 2009, Nintendo didn't really put forth any effort to treat what should have been their new "core audience" like a flagship audience. The "Wii series" games on Wii U were all given mostly quiet releases and used as test cases for new business models (Wii Sports Club, Wii Fit U) and bad marketing campaigns (Wii Party U). NSMBU had relatively little effort put into it relative to SM3DW.
So, yeah, why would those "casuals" come back? Nothing was done to convince them that Nintendo actually values the kinds of games they choose to play.
It'd be like Nintendo suddenly not treating Mario games like a flagship franchise anymore and instead releasing different kinds of games that happen to use some characters and ideas from the series.
Oh wait,
that actually happened with the disappearance of new 2D Mario games for almost 15 years.
Nah, I think he's saying mobile gaming is doing that for them now.
Because, of course, mobile gaming
has caused a massive number of people to buy Nintendo systems who wouldn't otherwise, and has allowed a large number of console and handheld games to flourish far beyond their previous potential. We haven't seen exactly the opposite, where the audience is shrinking and becoming less profitable.
(sarcasm btw)
