- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
Actually, the Wii did bring in a certain amount of players into the core audience, mostly by accident. Yes, the supposedly "hardcore" games in the platform failed hard, but a lot of people who normally wouldn't give videogames the time of day were introduced to consoles via the Wii, and then moved on to other platforms, or stuck with Nintendo until the Switch was released.I doubt that. The Wii is a great example. It's popularity was meant to drive a new wave of hardcore gamers, but in practice they stuck to playing wagglefest shovelware, and publishers were more than happen than to churn that stuff out. More hardcore or gateway games failed, or at least were mediocre. To use your river theory, they sat in the centre of the main river until they washed out to sea.
A few months before the Switch came out, one of my colleagues at work gave his recently widowed mom a Wii U, and the old lady was hooked. Once she got her hands on a Switch, she was so completely addicted to Breath of the Wild that my colleague had to call her to make sure she was okay. And this isn't the only story in that vein I've seen these past few years (although it is the most extreme). Not all casuals turn hardcore, but even in a setting geared completely for casual play some people will always look for more.