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Comment by darkhorse222 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, fundamentally when people game they don't want to move. In the west the culture of leisure, particularly entertainment leisure, is sedentary.

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The Wii was one of the most successful consoles of all time. Half the games had people standing up and swinging at something. That doesn't track at all.

The main problem for Nintendo was that countless Wii buyers never moved beyond Wii Sports and maybe Mario Kart. Despite having over 100 million units sold, staple franchises sold pretty badly compared to the Switch.

Smash Bros Brawl? 13 million sales. Smash Bros Ultimate? 35 million.

Animal Crossing City Folk? 3 million. Animal Crossing New Horizons? 47 million.

Mario Party 8? 9 million. Super Mario Party? 21 million.

Zelda Twilight Princess? 8 million. Zelda Breath of the Wild? 34 million.

Basically, the Switch has 50% more units in the world, but you can tack on 200%-400% more sales per franchise entry in general; and some extreme breakouts. For this reason alone, Nintendo is never returning to Wii-era gimmicks, and we’ll probably never see “Nintendo Selects” again.

You know that the wiimotes have IMUs in them and motion games are still a thing on that platform, right?

The thing that really made the switch sell was it's portability.

The Wii was also extremely easily hackable. Everybody I knew in college were pirating Wii games.

I think that was purely from the novelty factor and because it initially attracted a lot of people who weren't into gaming. Past the first few funny weeks when people would let visitors try wii sports and have a few laughs, the thing ended up collecting dust in most households with no kids.

Wii Sports 2 sold 30M units, 3 years post launch. That’s top 30 for all platforms all time.

Even 5 years post launch Just Dance 3 sold 10M units.

Just dance is for young children playing with their friends. That is not the core gaming market.

Let's stack up all PC games and all console games and let's see which ones involve physical movement and then see how long people stick with those games. Do you know any gamers? I do. They don't want to move.

'Gamers' are now everyone. 1.7 billion men and 1.39 billion women - essentially anyone with a mobile device. One of the biggest gaming hits of the last decade was Pokemon Go, which literally requires a walk.

'Gamers don't want to move', is just nerd bashing. It's 2025, even amongst hardcore D&D playing, JRPG stanning, con attending 'weeb' adjacent ubernerds, fitness is in. Sure Americans, and increasingly Europeans are tending toward obesity, but suggesting thats a characteristic of 'gamers' as a class is just factually incorrect.

1 - https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-gamers

We’ve had widespread videogames for like a generation and a half or so, it is early to say there’s anything fundamental in our culture about them. If good VR were to come out, there’s every chance it could go in direction more like sport than game.

But “good VR” is this sense is really very far off. Like actually judging the devices as things you might want to use, instead of with the engineer’s perspective (yea we’re all very impressed by what Oculus pulled off with the limited tech of our day, but the devices actually kinda suck if you don’t grade them on that curve).

They need to be as easy to put on as sunglasses, need to be able to just pop them on without pre-analyzing your space, there needs to be good force-feedback (you can’t have a satisfying sword fight in VR). This isn’t possible yet, of course, so it continues to be niche.

Exactly, the point of egaming is to not move your fat ass. Otherwise you would be doing sports, most of them being just games.

FWIW, I like playing VR/MR games because they are "sports" that don't require me to drive anywhere or organize anything with other people. To me it's about equal fun as downhill skiing or skating at the roller rink but a lot cheaper than either, and without needing to travel.

Not really, that is a very limited view on why video games are different than other games.

Otherwise gamers could as well be watching TV.

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