Why Nintendo Switch Sports is as important as Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 | Opinion
Christopher Dring
Head of Games B2B
Tuesday 19th April 2022
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Don't say it too loud, in case we scare them off again, but some of that Wii and DS audience might have come back.
It's incredible to think Nintendo sold over 250 million games machines during that Wii/DS generation. The decision to avoid going head-to-head with Xbox and PlayStation and instead target entirely new audiences was a brave and ultimately triumphant one.
Nintendo won over millions of customers through brain training puzzle games and virtual bowling. But then, almost as quickly, it lost them again.
We can make an educated guess about where some of those players went. The DS experience was replicated quite well on smartphones. But the Wii experience? Perhaps it was smartphones that did for that, too. Maybe players traded swinging and waggling for swiping and tapping. Or maybe they didn't trade it for anything. It's not unfathomable to think that, for some people, the Wii was the one and only time they dabbled in console gaming.
"This isn't 2007, but it's clear that there's a considerable and active audience of casual gamers on Nintendo Switch"
Nintendo has tried to appeal to that audience a few times since. Sometimes in the form of sequels (Nintendogs + Cats on 3DS or Wii Sports Club on Wii U), and occasionally with completely new concepts; one of the more ambitious things the company did during the early years of Switch was Nintendo Labo, an educational toys-to-life series aimed at families and children.
It's harsh to call any of these failures, but they hardly convinced that Wii and
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