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Can Nintendo Court the Casuals Again?
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Eurogamer:
"Do you remember the last time? When the Wii launched at the tail end of 2006, it was to an air of excited curiosity that went well beyond the borders of core gamers, with Nintendo conjuring what ran close to a full-blown phenomenon. ... Nintendo's masterstroke, of course, has been resurrecting the ultimate hardcore poster girl with the announcement that Bayonetta 2 is heading exclusively to the Wii U. There's something slightly incongruous about an over-sexed, incredibly violent action game rubbing shoulders with Mario and co., but then again that's exactly what makes the proposition so very exciting. ... There's still one very important section of the market that may prove a little tougher to persuade. Right now it's harder to see the broader appeal of the Wii U, and it's not simply a case of fearing that it'll fail to replicate the success of its predecessor — there's every chance that it could endure the same rocky start that plagued Nintendo's 3DS."
We had the Wii - managed to score one the weekend it came out. But after about 18 months it became apparent this was going to have some real dumbed-down titles. A few stick out in my mind, most notably the Endless Ocean and Endless Ocean 2 games. I miss those enough I've been thinking of picking up a Wii after the Wii U comes out to replay them, when the price drops.
As for the Atari 2600 I had as a kid - I recall that having a greater variety of games that were almost more challenging. I don't miss it enough to buy the controller/ROM combination, but I distinctly remember titles we traded with friends and played for years. Maybe some of that is nostalgia for long summers and the lack of overall console variety then, but I was distinctly unimpressed with the Wii; with the notable exception the two titles I mentioned above.
When our Wii gave up the ghost I relented and bought an XBox for my son and that's been a great console - a good variety of games and ab online game store worth dropping some dough on. There will have to be something extraordinary for my generally Nintendo-friendly family to even consider by a Wii U. They lost us with the terribly poor game selection on the Wii and DS systems.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
That's partly because no one wants to develop a game for the Wii when it's massively underpowered compared to the 360 or PS3.
At this point the term 'casual' gamer really means someone who games occasionally, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to play shitty games with low production quality, they just don't want to spend 3 hours a day every day playing games.
For the Wii basically all of the good games that have a broad appeal are first party nintendo products. That's a problem, because without the ecosystem there's no long term monetization strategy. Although just dance managed to do well as a franchise.
Also, I tend to think the premise of 'are they going to win back casuals' is wrong. I don't think they want to. They sold 100 million Wii's, and then pitifully few games. That's not a good business strategy. Now admittedly, they made money on the consoles, but they'd be happier to sell 50 million consoles and 4x as many games sort of thing. Lots of people bought a wii, wii sports, and one game, and never touched the thing again, all of that unrealized potential turns out to be really really really hard to capitalize on. It's easier to make something people who buy a lot of games want, so you can keep selling them games.
Valid point, but there is a niche within the niche. Ever since the Wii Nintendo has been marketing towards the "family night" crowd. You'll see in almost every ad a group of family or friends taking rounds at having a blast at whatever happens to be on the screen. This still appeals to a great number of people and it is hard to get excited about the idea of sitting around in the same room with your iPhones/Droids playing Words With Friends (unless, I dunno, you were having some sort of tournament?).
As far as I can tell, the definition of a "casual" gamer is "anybody who isn't a 15-30 year old male". I mean, I still hear of puzzle adventure players (who tended to be middle-aged women) being seen as casual gamers, while the people who play really quite simple hack-and-slash games (which appeal more to younger men) are considered hardcore. The mistakes, I think, are:
1. to aim most video games at a particular demographic and then wonder why nobody else is getting interested in them, and
2. hire young male game designers and wonder why they can't write a great game that appeals to older people or women.
It definitely has nothing to do with the difficulty or intracacy of the game.
I am officially gone from
Drop the middle man and sell me $20 games rather than $70 dollar one (I live in Sweden) and I may start buying games.
I think I read that 97% of the games played in PCs was pirated copies? No, price wont solve that I suppose but you're pretty lame if you copy a full game you could had bought for $10.
Best Buy and Target have already stopped taking orders for both the deluxe and regular systems, and Gamestop has sold out of the deluxe systems. So it's already eerily similar to the Wii's pre-launch situation, and that console was very hard to find for months.
So no, there's little evidence that a rocky start is in store.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
...with lots of automated violence. It's more casual than something like Pikmin by miles.
it's harder to see the broader appeal of the Wii U
The broader appeal of the Wii U is that it is no longer just a video game/fitness machine, it is now a TV set-top box and an intelligent TV remote as well. It is an aggregator of multiple internet-driven entertainment choices. The opportunity for Nintendo to may serious money is immense. I can sense the determined hand of Reggie Fils-aime ( Nintendo US CEO) behind Nintendo's newest push.
No. But it goes beyond just the law, for a number of reasons:
Wii was introduced before the housing bubble burst and long before the global economic recession. People had the idea that they had money to spare, whether or not they actually did. This helped fuel generic consumer interest along with the "newness" that is motion controls. In addition, the new price points puts Nintendo out of that "sweet number" they had in 2006. The $250 price point for the Wii at release in 2012 dollars is $285; the cheapest model is $299, and wages haven't kept up with inflation.
Motion controlling was a big thing when the Wii released--while it was not exactly new tech, Nintendo managed to mainstream it and make it work (sort of, the Wiimote Plus greatly improved this but still had issues.) Furthermore, the controllers for other consoles were seen as "intimidating" to your average consumer due to the myriad of buttons and inputs on them (whether or not this is true I don't know, but it was common thought both then and now). The Wiimote was extremely simple and could be used as a controller harking back to the NES days.
The Gamepad doesn't offer anything in the "wow-factor" to pull consumers in. Touch-screens have been around for quite some time (the original DS had a touch screen, after all) and everyone is tablet-crazy these days so it acts like a me-too. In addition, it integrates all those scary buttons. Furthermore, at least to someone like myself who is a regular gamer, the controller looks horribly clunky (my understanding from reading testimonials of those who have been able to hands-on is that it actually works decently, but that's not going to stop perception of those on the outside.)
The Wii U is, from my understanding, about as powerful as the 360. While I can understand that Nintendo wants to focus on user interface, they can't ignore that having a lower-powered system hurt them greatly this last gen. It wasn't the controller, it was the system processing power that kept a lot of otherwise-multi-console games from coming to the Wii (and when they did they were relatively bad). Nintendo has caught up, but as soon as the PS4 and XBox720 come out (supposedly in the next 18 months), they'll be lagging behind once again. Furthermore, by tipping their hand this early, it gives Microsoft and Sony a chance to integrate whatever features into their next system and likely do it better (the Kinect and Move have their own issues that will likely be firmed up and integrated better for the next console cycle).
A big selling point for the Wii was that it came with Wii Sports. The Basic (read: cheap) version of the Wii U comes with no games (except whatever demos or utilities they have on the system, like TVii), which only intensifies the economic issue. This may be intentional, though, as the tie-in (how many game were sold per console) for the Wii is extremely low, especially compared to the other consoles. By forcing "casual" consumers to buy games off the bat they can increase that number this time around; many bought the wii, played Wii Sports, and then never bought another game.
Nintendo also has a lot of uphill battles with 'core' gamers, too:
--Their online capabilities seem to still lag entire generations behind the competition (those horrible friend codes will apparently make an appearance on Wii U)
--Aforementioned power
--A number of AAA games they have announced are mere ports of games have been out for some time
--Internal Storage is limited to a max of 32GB, important as digital sales increase; however, this can be expanded (supposedly easily)
--Games, games, games, games. Nintendo didn't learn from the 3DS, apparently--the launch window library is fairly "meh", and we don't even know launch titles except for NSMBU
I've been a devout Nintendork for my life, fighting many a troll online for the Gamecube
I think the main thing that disappoints me about the Wii U is the way it completely abandons motion control. I bought a Wii for Wii Sports. I had minimal interest in classic Nintendo titles, and absolutely no interest Xbox/PS3-style games. Then there was MotionPlus and Tiger Woods Golf, and that was fun for a long time. EA makes the same game on other platforms, but I have zero interest in mashing buttons together in order to simulate a golf game.
Since then, I've bought a handful of different games, some of them with pretty traditional controls (with lame waggle "enhancements") (e.g., Galaxy), and that's been fun, and I love Nintendo's creativity in a lot of their titles, but, still, the motion controls in something like Skyward Sword are far more interesting to me than anything else.
Enter Wii U. Doesn't do anything to push the motion control technology forward. Doesn't even ship with motion-sensitive controllers or a sensor bar. All that is abandoned in favor of a touchscreen melded with traditional gaming controls. I have a hard time seeing how new games (the next Zelda, for example) are going to improve on the experience I enjoyed the last time around -- because now Nintendo's going to be all about producing games that take advantage of the new controller. How do they even release a new Sports for the Wii U? Seems like that title is just put on hold...
I will gladly give my money to Nintendo for the Wii U. I am a gamer, with a huge passion for games. Finally Nintendo will provide next-gen gaming on their consoles. Nintendo, compared to Sony and Microsoft, is a company for gamers.
They dont charge you for online play (Looking at you M$), they dont charge you for additional storage by selling you some proprietary hdd. They dont remove features after the sale ( install other OS??) and they dont go in rage mode and start suing their customers. They also did not have any security breaches...
For me it is quite clear, if there will be a game which comes to all consoles, Ill be getting the Wii U version (unless there is a PC version ofc)
it has ABC(ESPN) sports, for streaming, finally I can say f the cable bill!
Are you sure it doesn't A. require a name and password issued by a pay TV provider, or B. query your cable ISP's database to see whether the current DHCP lessee of a given IP address also has a cable TV subscription that includes ESPN?
is playing Angry Birds
No.
Casual gamers are playing games on their phones. NIntendo fucked themselves over by not bothering to put out any titles at all for the Wii during its entire run.
Oh sure, you had a couple of Mario games, one Zelda, and... No More Heroes? I think that was about it. The rest were junk, they never released a "greatest hits" $20 version of any titles until early in 2012, and there's nothing compelling in the library.
Jerk off over the hardware all you want. No games -- no sales.
And again, people who want to play a game casually for five minutes at a time are going to whip out their phone and play a $1 game.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Haha. No. The Wii/DS generation was extremely profitable for Nintendo and far more successful than the Gamecube/GBA generation before it. Now the 3DS hardware is profitable again and Wii U hardware is supposedly profitable right from the start, so Nintendo's prospects are pretty good.
Sony, on the other hand, is in serious trouble. If anyone's getting out of the console business, they'll be first to go.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
people who want to play a game casually for five minutes at a time are going to whip out their phone and play a $1 game.
Provided they have a phone. True, a grown-up interested in video games can almost be assumed to own a smartphone nowadays. But any game rated E or E10+ includes kids as part of its intended audience. A phone capable of gaming costs well over $1,000 once you factor in an iControlPad and the cost of cellular voice and data service for two years. I'm under the impression that a lot of parents can't afford this for their kids, so they buy each kid a flip phone on a $80/year prepaid carrier as a pay phone replacement ("this is for getting a ride home; use the land line at home for long calls") and a DS/3DS for gaming.
The only requirement for Nintendo's "Seal of Quality" was money. Pay them and you got it. 90% of all NES and SNES games were absolute crap because of that.
The 97% pirated number comes from an idiotic Ubisoft executive who was lying about how necessary DRM was. Please do no promote this myth.
That's only kind of true. It depends on the game, but some titles, ya, the piracy rate is easily up in the 90% range. If you only release your game in the US, or France or the like you have to realize that it's going to be pirated everywhere else, a lot.
My biggest piracy gripe at the moment (as a game developer) is when one of my friends pirates a game and says something like 'I spend enough money on games already". As in, they paid for world of warcraft, call of duty etc. All the ones that have an online component you can't get out of, and can get banned from if you pirate. But then the rest of us, who make smaller indie-niche-no massive online service titles are the ones not getting paid, and it's not like EA (or paradox for that matter) just throw us money for being nice people.
Ubisoft is interesting because they don't have a lot of focus in their publishing, they have Assassin creed, splinter cell, Far cry, and then the ANNO series, and Rayman legends and just dance type stuff. For them I'm sure they are constantly grappling with using the profits from the successful games to fund popular but unsuccessful games, and trying balance that out against piracy cutting into particular portions of their business isn't going to be fun. I'd be surprised if the 97% figure is accurate, but I would not all be surprised to hear a 90% piracy rate for some of their smaller titles like shoot many robots and the like. Well that, and they got themselves enormous bad press for DRM so lots of people are pirating their stuff on principle.
Contrary to what many hardcore gamers seem to believe, casual gaming has nothing to do with quality or price. It has everything to do with time.
Casual gamers simply aren't able or don't want to spend hours learning a game's mechanics, then spend more than an hour on a single level.
Imagine never being able to play gaming sessions longer than 15 minutes. A game like Zelda would be unplayable to such a casual player.
A game like Angry Birds is definitely a better purchase for a typical casual gamer than Zelda, even if Zelda was $5 and Angry Birds cost $20, simply because they'll actually be able to play a few levels of Angry Birds every day.
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