Nintendo Wii U - Part Two - How a Misread Target Audience Can Tank a Product
Everyone and their grandmother owned a Nintendo Wii.
Lest you think that's an exaggeration, I'd like to direct you to the video below:
No question about it: The Nintendo Wii simply caught like wildfire. Not only did Nintendo fans buy it, but so did people who have no interest or experience in video games at all. This was unprecedented in video game history, and Nintendo assumed all these new adopters were becoming Nintendo fans, not fans of the Wii alone.
In 2012, Nintendo thought they'd be able to replicate their historic success and capture lightning in a bottle twice by releasing their newest machine -- the Wii U. But no one was buying it. Why? Why was the Wii such a meteoric success while the Wii U struggled to be profitable? I mean, aside from what I covered in part one of this series.
I believe the answer is simple: Nintendo misread their target audience.
In the video game community, there are basically two categories of people who play games:
1) The "casual" gaming audience. This crowd occasionally plays games to pass the time, but don't follow the gaming industry, purchase major consoles, or invest themselves in larger-scale games. This group adopted the Wii en masse, and have now moved on to smartphone games like Angry Birds, Words With Friends, Candy Crush, Temple Run, Draw Something or Trivia Crack. Just about everyone in the country plays video games; they're just primarily on smartphones now.
2) The "hardcore" gaming audience. This crowd follows the games industry and enjoys investing in larger-scale games. They're interested in purchasing dedicated gaming hardware, and are willing to pay high prices for games with a lot of depth.
Once the Wii launched, Nintendo had both of these audiences to cater to. One group (the casual group) embraced games that were simple to pick up and play with friends (games like Just Dance, or Wii Sports). The other group (the hardcore group) wanted games that had depth to them. They wanted deep gameplay, strong narratives, and high graphical fidelity. These include games like Zelda, and Metroid, and classic franchises re-imagined on the new Wii hardware.
Nintendo tried to cater to both of these groups at once with mixed results.
They made their famous franchises (Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, for example) more accessible to the casual market, and also tried to create new entries in long-running series like Mario and Zelda to appease hardcore fans. But the Wii ultimately favored the casual market in the long run, causing many hardcore gamers who had considered themselves longtime Nintendo fans to leave in favor of its competitors, Xbox and Playstation.
Even among casual gamers though, the Wii was a temporary fad. It launched in 2006 and was a big deal for awhile, but once smartphones became commonplace and Apple introduced the App Store, the casual audience left the Wii in droves and flooded to the more simple, inexpensive games of iOS.
The audience that had once made Nintendo's console a phenomenon were all gone. Why pay 200 dollars for a dedicated game console when you can just use your smartphone (which you already have in your pocket anyway) to download a free game off of the App Store? The gaming business was changing, and Nintendo was too caught up in the Wii's success to notice.
The Wii U was an attempt to cater to both audiences, without Nintendo realizing that both audiences had already left them. Hardcore gamers left the Wii brand for Playstation and Xbox, and casual gamers had already left the Wii ecosystem to play cheaper games on mobile phones. The only audience that bought a Wii U are the Nintendo faithful - the small hardcore gaming audience that enjoyed Nintendo's games enough to buy the expensive, cumbersome Wii U.
At the end of the day, the lack of a clear target audience is how the Wii U became the lowest-selling mainline Nintendo console of all time. The system clocked in at just under 14 million units sold, compared to the Wii's meteoric 104 million.
But there is hope!
Present-day Nintendo seems to have learned from their mistakes. They have been developing games on smartphones to recapture the mindshare of the casual audience, including popular games like Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem: Echoes, and the game-turned-worldwide-phenomenon Pokemon Go. Not only that, but they released a new console called the Nintendo Switch in March 2017, an excellent iteration on their original idea for the Wii U that is selling faster than any console in their history (even faster than the original Wii).
Nintendo has always been a fascinating company to me, one that can make an extraordinarily baffling decision one moment, and turn around another moment with the most novel and well-implemented idea the industry has ever seen. It will be riveting to see where they go next.