The Wii was on the of the best selling consoles of all time? I believe only surpassed by the PS2.
Is the gimmicky a personal opinion or something you believe didn’t resonate with customers?
Is the gimmicky a personal opinion or something you believe didn’t resonate with customers?
In terms of sales, you're absolutely right - the Wii crushed it. I'd be curious to know about usage and software sales though. Maybe I'm wrong (very possible), but almost everyone I knew had a Wii at some point, but they didn't use it outside of a family toy with a few games when they first got it. I'd still consider that a win for Nintendo compared to less sales, but I'd imagine the average Xbox 360 or PS3 had a lot more software sales per console.
Nintendo still uses motion controls; they just made them portable and more resilient with gyros instead of IR.
A lot of them were played with a Nunchuk to emulate a classic controller (or attached to the actual Classic Controller or Rock Band instruments to play cross platform games).
The motion control that comes to mind beyond Wii Sports were circling the Wiimote to collect things in Mario.
Even games that didn't require motion controls for basic gameplay still required you to do things like turn the controller around and use the pointer to select options from a menu rather than using the D pad. (I'm thinking Punch Out). I think Donkey Kong country occasionally made you shake the controller.
The attachment rate was likely lower because of that.
At various points in my family's owning one, we obviously used it for the Wii Sports-type games, as well as non-motion games like NES titles from the Virtual Console (the Wiimote in its rubber case felt surprisingly decent in the hands while turned sideways). But we also used it for Netflix and YouTube with the official apps, and surprisingly, various other websites with the Internet Channel. We sometimes used the SD card reader to look at photos from digital cameras, which seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense today, but was easier than connecting up a camera or camcorder to a TV with a cable to look at things, which was also a thing back then.
It was certainly a "go long periods without touching it" part of the home, but it was also surprisingly versatile with the uses that did pop up for it. And I think we got more usage out of it, both in terms of hours and in terms of distinct use cases, than we got out of the Xbox 360 we had later (if not, it was basically due to Minecraft, not because we played a larger number of games on the Xbox).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_co...
You could argue the Switch is a home console as well.