The Wii U Audience

When the Wii launched the immediate sales were mostly from hardcore gamers. It was a low enough price to buy alongside an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and they were excited to see how motion controls would work. We all thought it would be the new way to play games. Well, like most innovations, it turned out motion controls were amazing for certain games but pretty weak for others, but Nintendo was very good with marketing the game to non-gamers. Just as the hardcore gamers were moving on from the Wii, the casual players started getting into it. Suddenly millions of people who did not consider themselves gamers were playing games.

Unfortunately, Facebook and iPhone came out. Facebook was an immediate hit for casual players. The games were easy to pick up and play, just like their Wii games. They focused on social connections with Facebook friends, just as their favorite Wii games focused on local multiplayer with their friends. But these Facebook games were free-to-play. You no longer needed to buy a Wii and the games to play with friends. You could do it for free within your web browser. The Farmville craze took over.

Gaming on iPhones had a slower start because of that initial cost of the phone. An iPhone cost more than a Wii. Most casual players would not even consider it. However, that barrier disappeared when phone carriers started offering older iPhones free with their phone contracts. Just like Facebook games, iPhone games were cheaper than Wii games. The smartphones also had the advantage of fitting in your pocket. Casual players with their busy social lives had all their games available wherever they went.

The casual players had left console gaming. It is no surprise that the Wii U is having trouble lately. The key demographic that made Nintendo the most money with the Wii is largely gone. Some of them will undoubtedly buy or have already bought a Wii U, but Nintendo cannot expect much from them.

So that leaves the hardcore gamers. The problem is they do not seem to be buying the Wii U either. Sure, it had fairly good launch sales, but they have dried up. One explanation is the games. Since launch there have been no major game releases for Wii U. The most popular games have been Nintendo’s own Nintendo Land and Super Mario Bros U. Both have received pretty good reviews and sold fairly well, but both were also released on launch day.

The big releases everyone was waiting for after launch were Rayman Legends and Pikmin 3. Both were delayed. Rayman Legends has been delayed until September, so Ubisoft can release it as a multiplatform game. Pikmin 3 was delayed until Spring. I think it will meet that deadline even though Nintendo has still not given a concrete release date. The only game not delayed is Lego City: Undercover, but sadly, its sales are going to suffer very badly. It is not a big enough game to be a system seller, and all the attention is on Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles right now.

That attention has all the hardcore gamers in “wait-and-see” mode. That is, ultimately, a bigger explanation why hardcore players not buying the Wii U. They will not buy any consoles until they have seen what all three are capable of. Nintendo absolutely must get a big game released on Wii U that takes good advantage of the touch screen to compete with the launches of these upcoming consoles. If they do not the Wii U will continue to suffer and could possibly be another Gamecube. The Gamecube was a great console, but it never took off like the original Xbox and PlayStation 2. It was a dark period in Nintendo’s history.

Right now, the Wii U really does not have an audience. A rosier way to say that is the Wii U has not found its audience yet. Nintendo succeeding in this is going to be one-hundred percent up to them. The casual players are no longer there buying up every Nintendo game they come out with. Hardcore gamers are much more picky especially when they have the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 to think about. Nintendo needs to create truly innovative games that utilize the touch screen. The Wii U cannot compete on graphics, only great games using the touch screen.

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The Problem with Being Unique

Whenever a new console comes out, it is an exciting time. I like to follow the sales numbers and watch for unique games coming out. So naturally, I have been watching Wii U, but Nintendo is between a rock and a hard place. See, Nintendo has been making innovations with their hardware for almost a decade now. The Nintendo DS added a second screen with touch controls, the Wii added motion controls, the Nintendo 3DS added stereoscopic 3D to games, and finally, the Wii U adds a tablet controller.

The problem is those innovations directly push away the third party developers Nintendo tries so hard to get making games for their consoles. Publishers are out to make money. They make far more money if they can make one version of the game on the dominant console platform and then quickly port it to the other consoles. Profit margins are so low with most games these days, they just cannot afford to make a custom, unique port for the Nintendo systems.

The Wii U by being unique with the tablet controller forces publishers to either go all in or all out. While they could just port the games without supporting the tablet screen at all, I get the feeling Nintendo requires developers to make some use of it. The developers either have to make almost a new game from the ground up that works well with the Wii U tablet, or they just skip the Wii U. Guess which one is easier?

Now, the Nintendo DS and Wii did seem to get around this problem. The fact is they were extremely popular systems, so popular that developers could justify making a special port just for the DS or Wii. If you have 80 million systems sold, publishers can pretty much guarantee they will sell hundreds of thousands of units. There is still a risk they might just break even on the port, but with that many systems in people’s homes, there is a good chance they will make a profit.

The Wii U is starting out slow. It does not have the sales numbers to get publishers to port games for it. They feel like they have to make a unique game just for the Wii U. Otherwise, players will just buy the game for the other popular consoles, and the publisher’s money spent porting it was wasted. Remember that the 3DS had similar problems. It had a slow start, even slower than the Wii U, and did not really start selling until the price cut and the new Mario came out.

Until the Wii U’s sales go up, it is going to have trouble getting multiplatform games. While Wii U is doing better than the 3DS, it is still possible Nintendo may do an early price cut. Nintendo has stated they will not be doing this for the Wii U, but there is still a chance around E3 or the holidays depending on where the sales are at. It will largely depend on new iterations of Nintendo’s classics (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.) to prop up Wii U sales. I am expecting one big Nintendo game for 2013’s Christmas season.

Videogames Are Not Art, Something More

Videogames are not art. But hear me out before you flame me. I have been thinking about this for a while and there is a key difference between videogames and the artforms. Videogames are interactive. Artforms are not. Just think of this example. What if you were watching a movie that let you choose the major decisions the character made? The movie sequences themselves you would consider art, but the act of making that decision is not art. Interactivity is not art.

Coming from a fairly hardcore gamer, this may seem like sacrilege. Videogames as art is the holy grail of the industry. We need the mainstream society to see games equally with films, music, and books. But we really don’t. Videogames shine through their interactivity, not the art. It’s great when the art is good, but every long time gamer realizes eventually that games are about the game play. You can put up with bad art if the gameplay is great. Certainly, good art can enhance the gameplay experience, but it is always about the gameplay.

And so, videogames are something more than art. The next evolution. Movies, music, and books represent the passive experience. Videogames are the first form of the interactive experience. I have seen some interactive movies and books. In a way these can be thought of as primitive videogames. Technology was not there to really provide full interactivity. I firmly believe the future will be about interactivity. Will there be something else, some new interactive experience that 1-ups videogames? Maybe, but we can at least be happy that videogames started this new revolution.