According to GameDaily, US research firm Frank N. Magid Associates has been surveying Wii fans to find out who's been buying Nintendo's hugely successful machine. And the key finding may surprise you.
Although we've been led to believe that it's non-gaming consumers who're driving Nintendo's business, it turns out that, in 73% of households the primary Wii gamer is - a young male. It's only in the category of secondary Wii gamer - i.e. the person who comes along and has a go, but isn't the owner of the console - that things equal out, with 45% of households counting women in this sector.
If you look at the games coming out for Wii, while there are plenty of Wii Sports-style casual mini-game romps, there are plenty of traditional Nintendo titles - cute, cheerful, but relatively demanding and conventional in terms of genre. Check out the Metacritic page for Wii and you'll find very few of those beloved mainstream titles amid the big scorers - it's stuff like Super Mario Galaxy, Legend of Zelda and Resi 4. Of course critical opinion is no reliable guide to consumer behaviour, but it's an indication of how seriously the machine is treated by gaming veterans.
In the end, maybe Nintendo still needs us more than a lot of people thought it did.
.jpg?w=600)
