I disagree, quite strongly.
Well, of course you disagree; you have an extraordinarily black-and-white picture of the market.
In the 1980's, all gamers were new gamers.
Well, one, that's not exactly true -- by the time Nintendo got into the home console market, arcade video games were already ten years old.
But secondly, this is really at the heart of the problem with your concept here. You posit this massive audience lying in wait who have no interest in current games but behave exactly like gaming hobbyists as long as their ultra-specific needs are being met. While there's certainly a portion like this (products like 2D Mario that are unambiguously games and serve a market of gamers who were less enthused by other popular offerings), the lion's share of Nintendo's "expanded market" growth is off the backs of people who have no specific interest in "gaming" at all and instead just had other desires that Nintendo's products served: parents who wanted something fun to do with their kids, old people who wanted something to keep their minds sharp, people who wanted to get the effects of exercise without all the hard work.
These audiences are inherently flightier not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they're fulfilling a tangential need with Nintendo's products rather than a core one. If someone who was a Brain Training buyer seven years ago suddenly wants to, I dunno, get into the habit of using an expense tracking service or learning how to fish or whatever, they're not going to look first to Nintendo because gaming isn't a core value for them.
Every entertainment medium has to expand until it's become mainstream. Video games haven't accomplished that yet.
Approximately every single person on earth has played FarmVille or Angry Birds at this point. Just about every child in America who grows up above the poverty line and outside of a freakish fundamentalist household owns at least one video gaming device. That's pretty freakin' mainstream.
I also don't think that it requires genius level innovation to make these hit games.
"Genius" is a misleading word, but the point is that all of Nintendo's "expanded-market" hits are
singular: they each identify a completely untapped market, create the optimal configuration for tapping it, and consume it in the process. Brain Training and Wii Fit tapped into a latent desire for self-improvement, but in the process opened up both genres to ten thousand imitators that collectively can serve the market more thoroughly than the singular Nintendo effort. Wii Sports effectively created a family-oriented gaming environment -- one in which Nintendo hasn't had a hit in years and Kinect has moved in by offering something new.
Like, to go back to the (problematic) ocean metaphor, blue oceans are a fundamentally limited resource. If you find success in one, sharks follow you there and suddenly all that competition you avoided is present again. The more you successfully identify and seize, the fewer options you have next time. And it's fairly clear, I think, that Nintendo doesn't even have much incremental advantage anymore in some of these genres they opened up anymore.
As for Apple, they make hardware, they don't make games.
That's exactly the point. Nintendo can't compete for the money of people whose primary interest is in
nifty stuff because they aren't a nifty-stuff company. For the portion of the audience that plays games purely as a low-key source of entertainment rather than out of a
concrete desire to play games, Nintendo has nothing unique to offer.
Nintendo have had to retrench to their classic market, the people who want to buy their actual games, because they're a
game company. What they're good at is making games and selling them to people who like games. The "expanded market" was never going to be much more than a strategically beneficial side-business compared to that.
I argued in my last post that this isn't necessarily true.
But you missed the correlative factor here: the frequency with which titles can be iterated on is directly proportional to how closely they target
gaming enthusiasts. CoD can sell a new game to people every year because its target market is composed of young people who dedicate hundreds of hours to each title and still crave more. Assassin's Creed can sell a new game to people every year because it's targeting the spot of perfect balance between enthusiasm and mass appeal -- it's a pitch-perfect product to sell to people who really enthusiastically want to play a game with lots to do but don't want to engage with anything too weird or offputting.
The more you move away from an enthusiast audience, the less you can resell the same game. If there were a second Mario Kart for Wii, what would it even offer people? New tracks? There isn't a meaningful market there that cares about that. To resell this stuff you need to drag people along to new hardware (via one or two truly new and desirable pieces of software) and then fill the Mario-Kart-shaped hole in their collection.
Also, in my view, console generations were created due to increased competition in the market. Nintendo was facing competitors with more advanced hardware and they feared their less advanced NES would be abandoned by their customers.
Yeah, this just isn't a historically accurate picture.
