Hey, Malstrom
You mentioned how the Wii was originally codenamed Revolution. They wanted to create a gaming revolution, and based it around japanese men (in suits, to further tie in with a previous post about sloppy dressing) handing it off to non-gamers and letting them experience the revolution for themselves.
And now we have the Wii U. Codenamed Project Cafe. A place where you go to have a quick drink and light, non-threatening, non-intimate socializing. The trailer showed sloppy-dressed hipsters who already knew what they were doing game-wise, trying to make in-jokes that only those same real people would understand, and showing multiple ways of communicating with other people through their social networks and multiple ways of using their Wii U Gamepad the same way they could an iPad or an iPhone.
Wii U was supposed to be a return to the hardcore gaming audience for Nintendo, but the only really “hardcore” thing about it was the Wii U Pro Controller. The only thing really there for the “casual” Wii audience was that their old controllers are still compatible and they can use the Gamepad as a potential universal remote for their TVs. Everything else looked like it was zeroing in on the hipster Apple crowd.
It feels like they’re trying to con both the casual and hardcore gamer into funding their drive to be an Apple competitor.
In business, you want to travel with the trend.
The perceived trend at the time is Social Gaming. Therefore, you will see Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony focus on it.
I do not believe Social Gaming has a rosy future ahead of it. When we hit the Ninth Generation, whoever is positioned at the next trend will explode with success while people following the Social Gaming trend will falter. By the Tenth Generation, all game consoles will be making games for that trend and Social Gaming will be a relic like Cinema Gaming and Arcade Gaming and Tabletop Gaming is today.
The question is what will be the new trend? Whoever answers this will make several billion dollars.
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