10 replies to this topic

[Marc]

To put it simply, the Wii U is going to have the most influence on girls than any other 'home' console has had before. This makes too much sense after a little thought, so I made this post. Hello. Although the examples we have seen for the console so far have been working titles etc, the concept for Wii U kinda seems appropriate for a female audience more than the likes of the 360 and the PS3.

Spare a few thoughts to all the factors involved in the development of the Wii U, and what it stands for in this current time. Can you say that it isn't quite fitting? If examples must be made, just ask...but let's discuss first!

(P.S. I posted this in the Hardware part of the forum for a reason...)

[Ponkotsu]

In the least, it's undoubtedly a given that it's going to have the largest number of female gamers. Iwata talked about the gender breakdown of the Wii and DS userbases fairly recently - one of them had a close to 50-50 split, and the other actually had slightly more female users. So Nintendo does have a very established track record of appealing to women and girls than any other major industry player, and as they've noted that the 3DS userbase is presently mostly male, they're openly focusing on appealing more to women with the platform, too. It's definitely a safe bet that the Wii U will be just as focused on that as all their other recent platforms. It doesn't hurt that the competition is largely single-mindedly focused on testosterone and 'realistic' violence-driven games above all else, either.

[martoparto]

Yeah, look at the Playstation360.
Many of the games are FPSs, others are filled with zombies and only a small part of the games are actually fun for the female audience.
Now look at the Wii, there is Wii sports, Wii sports resort, Just Dance and many, MANY games that would appeal to the female audience.

[Katana]

Yes I agree,Nintendo stated a while ago that the industry was shrinking and that new audiences had to be found.The Wii was very successful in doing this but I think it didn't get the balance right...for every great game on the Wii there was a 100 rubbish 'lifestyle' games like Wii-Fit and Cooking with Mama...please don't get me wrong I have nothing against these titles but there was just too much of them and not enough triple AAA titles on the shelf.Also I bet most Wii-Fit peripherals are sitting in a cupboard rotting.
To survive companies will be looking to expand this audience and thats fine but they have to cater for the more gamer minded player like me and I guess most of the people on this forum...but I think the Wii-U will appeal to many different people over different ages...something the other two in their present forms will not do (unless they copy Nintendo which is a possibility)
There will be lifestyle peripherals and more of the same that the Wii had but with a difference...big developers will be on board this time bringing the 'hardcore' titles to Wii-U (something the Wii did not have) and I'f Nintendo expand on this audience will only mean that more sales of the machine,more dev companies getting involved,means me and you will have a bigger selection of games.The Wii was just not powerful enough to run these big name games but now its different.
I hope women,children,men,grannys and even the cat buys Wii-U and that their tastes are catered for because that will mean mine will be too

Edited by Katana, 31 October 2011 - 01:09 PM.

[Zuperman]

I can't see any obvious reasons that it'll attract girls, but I guess It could....

[Caius Casshern Sins]

Right now there aren't any reasons to say that. However it is expected that they will add games to the Wii U that will appeal to the female gamer. Nintendo like to broaden there focus of there audiences with their consoles. However one strong competition they will have is the kinect.

[Marc]

Right now there aren't any reasons to say that. However it is expected that they will add games to the Wii U that will appeal to the female gamer. Nintendo like to broaden there focus of there audiences with their consoles. However one strong competition they will have is the kinect.

Good point. Girls will come across XBox more often than the Wii U (although by then many XBox owners may not have additional hardware). By then, who knows where Kinect will be in it's life cycle? Maybe even be at it's peak!

[Bill Cipher]

Good point. Girls will come across XBox more often than the Wii U (although by then many XBox owners may not have additional hardware). By then, who knows where Kinect will be in it's life cycle? Maybe even be at it's peak!

I hate to sound like a troll/hater, but Kinect's peak was last year. Peak refers to it's prime in sales.

[Caius Casshern Sins]

But some girls will feel that the kinect is good enough for them. But than again if a game like cooking mama comes out, i think that will bring in a lot of female users.

[Marc]

I hate to sound like a troll/hater, but Kinect's peak was last year. Peak refers to it's prime in sales.

Ahhh, okay well I suppose what I mean is the height of it's capabilities realised. There is nothing to say that the sales of Kinect will rise again with new software. Makes a little more sense now I hope

[Ponkotsu]

Considering that Kinect's sales have trended notably downward after last year's holiday season and developers have been anything but confident in backing it, support having largely slowed to a trickle, it's probably a safer bet to make than not that Kinect's fifteen minutes have already passed. It was pretty much just a much more hyped, much better marketed EyeToy in the end, with all the meaningful limitations. It was never the threat to the Wii or Nintendo that it was played up as being - much like Sony's Move - and its mostly very poor software sales pretty much say it all.

In regard to Zuperman, at this point, the vast majority of what we've seen for the Wii U at this point have just been definitive version ports of major western violent titles, as Nintendo finally starts getting more of the third party support to appeal to that market. We definitely haven't seen much for the Wii U that will attract female gamers yet, but knowing Nintendo and their own statements, there's no question that those games are going to come. The Wii U was unveiled prematurely at E3 this year as a result of the leaks, and we're probably only going to see something of a trickle of information until the final unveil at E3 2012 before launch sometime next year. I suspect we'll see far more for a wider market then. But yeah, while Nintendo's going to be able to cater much more strongly to the 'core' market with third party attitudes visibly changing around the Wii U - and even the 3DS having one of their fastest growing libraries of T and M-rated games Nintendo's ever seen early in a platform's life - they're not going to cater solely to that audience either. They're open about their efforts to cater to girls and women just as much as boys and men, and they're more successful than any other major company in the industry. It just comes down to the fact that at this point, we've still seen very little of what's coming to the Wii U in concrete terms.

The Wii U will be significantly more powerful than the PS3 and 360, as we know - though they've also made it clear that it's being designed to be less dangerously costly to develop for than the PS3 and 360 have been, considering the insane amount of money the industry's lost betting on those systems, where most games simply don't sell well enough to recoup the massive development costs - but it isn't going to simply be a Nintendo response to those. It'll have stronger third party support than the Wii, taking into account all we've seen so far, but they're not about to abandon the very successful strategies of the Wii and DS, just as they aren't with the 3DS. It's all about appealing to as broad an audience as possible, and the competition largely shot themselves in the foot between their platforms' dangerous development costs and their willful pigeonholing of their audience - going after an extremely narrow 'hardcore' audience has translated into a very few major franchises making money and most games turning into painful financial blows to their parent companies.

As much as the industry is hurting right now - and as much as it should have focused on the Wii over the PS3 and 360 this generation - the Wii U, like the 3DS, looks to be designed to offer a panacea to the widespread financial pain. High-end software with lower development costs, and a focus again on the extremely broad audience - and continued use of the motion controls, with the Wii remote and nunchuk rightly not going away, vital as they are in providing accessible controls to the wider market that can't stand the clunky, increasingly outdated Dualshock-style controllers - to provide a much healthier place for development. On top of which, of course, the 3DS is turning into the last inexpensive retail platform to develop for as the DS and PSP fall away. What lies ahead after the 3DS is going to be a difficult question to answer, too, given the industry's need for mid and lower-tier developers to be able to get by without the multimillion dollar budgets the PS3, 360, and now Vita all call for - and many Wii U games will undoubtedly have too, though not as rigidly - and that a lot of these companies wouldn't be able to get by in sinking to the lower market of download-only titles, which tend to exist in a much more unreliable place in gaming in terms of mass market purchasing, and also suffer from most customers simply being unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for a download-only game. The industry and gaming as a whole will be much worse for it if we see the mid and lower development tiers budget-and-company-size-wise disappear, leaving us with only a mix of downloadable games and big multimillion dollar blockbuster efforts, which often end up being unfortunately overly conservative and unoriginal by design. The industry needs the freedom that comes with mid and lower budget titles to take risks and keep things fresh with more exciting, newer titles.

Whoops, got off on a tangent there again. Hah.