isiolia wrote:To an extent, sure. Going back to your original point about Nintendo returning focus to the core audience... maybe your answer for that is right there. The Wii came out in late 2006, and the first iPhone in 2007. For as well as the Wii ended up selling, smartphones ended up eclipsing it many times over. The kind of (objectively) casual gamers that some of the Wii's design direction was meant to capture ended up far more likely to just play games on their phone or tablet.
Excellent observation! The Wii was designed in an era where people were using simple phones and to fill the gaming desires, they needed a separate gaming device, now their smartphones double-up as a gaming device which has free online-multiplayer service too. There is a lot of social games to keep them engaged and connect with their social networks beyond what any 1 console can and on the go.
isiolia wrote:
I don't think it's quite the same thing. The Wii sold to a lot of people that just weren't otherwise in the market for a game console. To some extent, they did the same with the DS too, with things like Brain Training titles. At least, that's what I saw - the first person in my family to own a DS was my mom. She ended up buying at least one of my brothers one too, and literally the only things they had for them were those little brain teaser type titles. All abandoned for mobile stuff.
The Switch is more of a combined strategy. It's taking the folks that would have bought a Nintendo console anyway, for the first party IPs, for couch multiplayer, etc, and merging that customer base with the portable one, which they've dominated since ever. The success of the platform is bringing in the ports, just like it always does. It's a broadly successful system, but pretty much within the established customer base.
Arguably, stuff like Labo or some of the initial releases like 1-2-Switch are attempts at appealing to other audiences, but they don't exactly seem to have succeeded in doing that like Wii Sports did.
I couldn't agree more
Nintendo sure is dominant and actually almost the single provider of hand-held gaming, but unintentionally the android/ios platform has outgrew it to become the dominant hand-held/mobile gaming device. I really do believe there are more gamers, more games, and developers make more money on android/ios than DS or The Switch.
Games quality, though, is for a different topic...
marurun wrote:The right JoyCon has an IR sensor that has a lot of hypothetical functionality, but I'm not aware, as of yet, of it being used with any kind of sensor bar or similar device in a motion control capacity. It very likely could be used that way, but I'm not yet aware of any announced plans to do so. But I suspect the Switch's gyro-based motion control capacity is likely more advanced than Wii Motion+.
This is interesting to build in hardware but not use it, usually manufacturers drop hardware to make it cheaper. Reminds me of the PSX serial and parallel ports on the PSX. I wonder how many people made use of it.
