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Are Hardcore Nintendo Fans Relevant Anymore?

Are Hardcore Nintendo Fans Relevant Anymore?

Nintendo believes that children are the future. It hopes to teach them well and show them the way to putting down their smartphones and getting hooked on its more complex, high-quality console games. As more and more rumors from reputable sites point to the NX being a console/handheld hybrid, we can see how Nintendo’s marketing strategies are aiming directly at kids and casual smartphone gamers. They’re hoping to hook people on Nintendo properties via smartphone games, then point them at Nintendo’s cool, multi-purpose new hardware. This especially works for kids, whose parents might be happy for them to have a durable portable kit that doesn’t include easy access to microtransaction-laden games.

This is a smart strategy for Nintendo, if the company can pull it off. Kids are under-served by the modern video game market, which is concentrated on epic, AAA titles aimed squarely at teens and adults. Nintendo has a great stable of kid-friendly mascots and tends to make games that are colorful and not terribly violent. Though the Wii U didn’t catch on heavily with consumers of any age, the 3DS family is quite popular with the kiddos. A portable console is familiar to them, and it’s just an extra bonus if they can plug it into the TV and play on the big screen sometimes. With only smartphones for competition in the kids’ market, NIntendo has a chance to grab a great new demographic that might end up sticking with the company for years to come… just like many of us who grew up on the NES and SNES did.

But what about Nintendo’s adult fans? We are, after all, the ones you always see pontificating about the company online. Some of us have stuck with Ninty through the Wii U years, while others feel like it just doesn’t care about us anymore and have left for the high-powered consoles. We’ve all read the million editorials about how Nintendo is doomed, doomed if it doesn’t make a console that’s more powerful than the competition or abandon hardware altogether. Then there are the people who think Nintendo has to start making “mature” games if it wants to survive. Aiming squarely at kids is probably the last thing these fans want Nintendo to do. They want Nintendo to be more like the competition, a competition that has largely left kids in the dust.

Here’s the thing, though – when Nintendo is at its best, its kids’ games aren’t just for kids. After all, Nintendo made the classic games we loved as kids and that have held up over the years. Over the course of the Wii U generation, Nintendo has been remembering that. It has largely abandoned some of the decisions it made in its Wii games that condescended to its audience. Super Mario 3D World is colorful and fun for all ages, but the later levels are hard as heck. Splatoon is a non-violent shooter that is fantastically fun for all ages. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild appears to be ditching the obnoxious, tutorializing sidekicks that have plagued previous 3D Zelda games entirely. Today’s Nintendo is one that caters just fine to both its young and older audiences, if we’re willing to give it a chance.

Are Hardcore Nintendo Fans Relevant Anymore?

I know some adult Nintendo fans will be sad if the NX doesn’t produce top-of-the-line visuals, while others will still be yelling about how the games need more maturity (whatever that means – boobs and violence, I guess). Sorry, but I feel like those folks might need to get over themselves a bit. You’re free to buy or not buy the NX, but it’s not reasonable to expect Nintendo to be something it isn’t. While Nintendo needs to make a console that’s attractive to third parties and easy to port to, it probably shouldn’t be trying to compete on ground that is already well-contested between Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Not when there’s a huge untapped market of kids who just might be persuaded to put down their parents’ phones for a bit and run around with an awesome, rugged portable/TV hybrid machine.

Nintendo’s most loyal fans are the ones who fell in love with the company when they were kids. If Nintendo wants to stick around, it needs to make more of those kinds of fans, not bend over backwards to please an existing, shrinking group of older fans. Besides, if the NX is done right, it should please both kids and adult fans. Nintendo’s biggest challenges, like getting online connectivity right and the attraction and retention of third-party developers, are things that will appeal to all demographics if they’re done well. As long as it keeps making quality games, most adult fans will stick with Nintendo. If it plays its cards right with design and marketing, Nintendo will earn a legion of young fans as well. The small demographic of adults who want Nintendo to turn into Sony or Microsoft just needs to accept that it’s not going to happen.

Kiddo picture reference: Nintendo of Europe

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