It sure is easy to crap on someone's opinion when you make it up for them. I never said they should focus on non-gamers.
Yes you did. You said Nintendo should make more "mainstream games" which basically meant you wish they were more popular. Now they are more popular, because...
I always felt Nintendo should target a wider audience by providing more variety.
Which they have, and you rail against members of this new audience. This argument is a loser, please try again.
No FPS games on a Nintendo console? Then f*cking make one and get the ball rolling.
Uhm... they have. Three, in fact. They even bought Retro just for this purpose and published Geist on the GC. The ball isn't rolling, because (according to some) third parties don't want to compete against Nintendo in a genre they have a game in. (Although they have no problem making half-assed copies of Wii Sports and Wii Fit and such.) So here's a no-win situation. If Nintendo DOES make a game in a certain genre, third parties get scared off at the prospect of competing against Wii Fit and Wii Music (heh.) If Nintendo DOESN'T make in a certain genre, third parties assume there is no market for such and continue to shovel crap onto it. This kind of circular reasoning was pretty damning to Nintendo until they seized the market through their own efforts and by their own hand. Now third parties look like stubborn, stupid, idiots. And it's win-win for Nintendo. If Third parties do jump on board Nintendo's selling-faster-than-PS2 console, great, Nintendo gets stronger. IF they don't, Nintendo gets
even stronger because they will get most of the industry's money to themselves.
Nowhere is focusing on the mainstream at the expense of Nintendo fans or dumbing down games in there.
Prove where they did that. Mario Galaxy has in one year, outsold Mario Sunshine's 6 year run. Super Smash Brothers Brawl has, in half a year, sold exactly the same as Melee's 7 year run. Even Metroid Prime 3, much maligned for it's supposedly poor sales, has done much better than Metroid Prime 2. Hell even Fire Emblem, one of Nintendo's b-list series, has increased sales on the Wii and is even the 2nd highest selling "RPG" to come out of Japan this gen (this first being Dragon Quest: Swords. another Wii game) If anything Nintendo has MORE fans this time around.
In fact, I'll ask you a question. Do you think Mario Kart Wii "scared off" hardcore fans? Let's say, what.. 1 million hardcores get "fed up" with the Wii Wheel and said "ZOMG TEH GAME HAS BEEN CASUALIZED" That would make the remaining fanbase from MArio Kart: Double Dash approx. 6 million. So you must also think that Mario Kart Wii somehow magically attracted 4 million new people (and counting). If you honestly believe that, then... well... I dunno. That's pretty amazing.
Nintendo actually did the very thing people were scared I was suggesting: they compromised who they were to attract a wider audience.
Which "Nintendo" would that be? The failing let's-please-hardcores-that-hate-us GC Nintendo? The who-cares-about-Japan N64 Nintendo? Nintendo has done enough slight changes in the generational transitions to be considered "compromises" to "who they are." If anything the Wii harkens back to NES days, and a lot of people are thrilled. Yet they've also mostly kept the same amount of games and the same type of games they usually make, while also making exactly SIX games thjat could be considered "non-games" on the Wii. Nintendo still has, and still will make a majority of hardcore games, no matter what easy stories the "ZOMG Casual" are to write.
This seems to be a good thing for some reason.
Do you know why I applaud Wii Play's meteoric rise? Why I high five my Nintendo fan buds when Wii Fit stormed the charts? Why I grin with glee that Nintendogs is the highest selling game this entire generation? Why I get giddy when I think that each Brain Age game has outsold GTA III?
Because that's more money for Nintendo, and more money for Nintendo is more hardcore games and better, more ground-breaking technology in the future. Do you think Nintendo could possibly put all that profit back into sequels to all these so-called "casual" or "non-games?" They could double the budget for ea- They could tr- They could QUADRUPLE the development budget for a sequel to each an every one of these games, and still have hundreds of millions, if not a whole billions of dollars just laying around, waiting for a desperate third party, or a new idea from one of their new talents, or simply just spreading the money around evenly through out their studios.
A rising tide lifts
all boats.