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Wii Game Devs Testing Waters With Less-Casual Games
MTV's Multiplayer Blog has a pair of interviews with Wii game developers about how they're struggling to reach a more hardcore gaming audience. Jordan Itkowitz, lead designer for Deadly Creatures, wants to stay away from designing a typical collection of mini-games, saying, "The trick is to get those new players to step outside that easy comfort zone and try some genres and experiences that, while accessible and familiar to gamers, are still a bit foreign to anyone who's new to the culture." Dan Borth of Red Fly Studio is skeptical of the viability of hardcore games without relying on Nintendo and other major companies to "put a valiant effort in properly supporting developers to create great games."
Not to every demographic, certainly not to me. I play games on the PC (CoD, HL etc - the big grown up games), yet on the Wii I mainly play silly games, like mario kart or sonic or brain training stuff, or guitar hero. This is because the missus also plays on the wii (who wasn't any kind of gamer before the wii).
One is the typical lone player in a room somewhere, the other is a social or family game played in the living room. I don't think we'd play hardcore games on the wii at all.
Kids seem to favour the Xbox at the moment - Wii isn't regarded so highly by them and the PS3 is too expensive with not great titles. I think Nintendo are between a rock and a hard place, in that they've done wonders to expand the demographic of players on the Wii, but in doing so they've had to market casual and family games rather than hardcore games because it's families who play the Wii the most.