Nintendo, and the Future of Casual Gaming

That title probably suggests a broader scope than this entry will actually offer. However, I couldn't resist commenting on Shigeru Miyamoto's remark that Nintendo's E3 lead balloon Wii Music is "better than a video game". Hubris is expected, if not justified, from the man who created both Mario and The Legend of Zelda, especially when his output captures the public's imagination and money in the quantities Miyamoto's recently has; but any time an artist (allow me to forgo argument for application of the term here) decides he is bigger than his medium, there is cause for concern. In this entry, I want to examine Nintendo's current audience, and the prospects of its existing after the end of this console cycle.

There is no doubt that Wii Music is a casual title, like every other game Nintendo showed during their now infamous E3 press conference. And it's tough to fault them when they've risen to dominance in the perpetual "console war" on the backs of casual gamers. This has naturally lead to spurned hardcores branding the Wii a "toy" and a "fad". But the casual market was big business long before Nintendo began testing its waters with their little white box, and while I suppose it could still turn out to be the case that the Wii really is just a fad, casual gaming most certainly is not. However, this is not to say that the casual market will always exist. One need look no further than the 1984 video game crash to see that a booming market, and one that has been around too long to be called a fad, can still disappear virtually overnight.

But while history can serve as a cautionary tale, it cannot predict the future. Therefore, the question of whether the present market for casual games will continue throughout this console generation and beyond is open to debate. My personal opinion is that we are not likely to see another crash like the one in 1984, which is across the board and more or less brings the industry to its knees. But I am starting to wonder whether there may not be a similar crash in the casual market sometime in the next few years. While the enthusiast market will never produce, by itself, the kind of revenue we're presently seeing, it is also unlikely to get overburdened with the kind of sub-par junk that causes markets to crash in the first place. When the uneducated consumer feels that she is more likely to get junk than quality for her money, she will find something else on which to spend her money. Take a look at the Wii section next time you're at a game retailer, and you'll see that the mechanism for destroying consumer trust is already being assembled. For every Wii Sports, there are at least 15 Ninja Bread Men.

The difference between 2008 and 1984 is that the hardcore market is viable now in a way it wasn't then. Therefore, when what I consider the inevitable crash of the casual market occurs, it won't spell the end of gaming as we know it. As long as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and the wealth of great third-party developers continue to produce games aimed at the hardcore market, that market is not going away. Of course when Miyamoto starts talking about his latest casual endeavor being "better than a video game", there seems to be cause for concern. And there is cause for outright fear when he says, as he did in an interview with 1Up's James Mielke: "With Zelda, we have to consider how to make it accessible for new gamers to pick up and play and enjoy just as hardcore gamers have." Have? Hopefully something has been lost in translation, but one would be excused for thinking that quote points at a casual future even for Nintendo's franchise titles.

As noted before, this is all speculation. Miyamoto may prove us all wrong again, and Wii Music may turn out to actually be better than a game, ushering in the era of console edutainment. But the market is bigger even than the great Shiggy, and it will ultimately be the quality of the Wii's software library--and not a single game--that determines its longevity, and maybe even the longevity of the casual market for console games.