Report results: Lots of Wii's Sitting in Lots of Closets

A report from The Nielson Company indicates that a lot of people who bought the Wii aren't actually using it.  Their chart showing a breakdown of active users of each console puts the Wii on bottom, even below Nintendo's underperforming GameCube.  This chart is turning up on every gaming site out there.

But as gaming site Joystiq points out, it's not quite as bad as it seems.  A second chart showing overall usage minutes, which most gaming sites have ignored, puts the Wii much higher.  The first chart is, to a great extent, simply the result of the Wii's immense popularity; many people bought a Wii who have never bought a game console before, and those are the sort of people who are likely to get bored of their new toy.  But lots of people are still playing Wii games.

Still, even in the second chart,the Wii isn't being used as much as the Xbox 360 or PS3.  I'm going to go ahead and blame Nintendo for this.  The company has tried so hard to woo the casual market and has shown so little interest in core gamers that they now have a console with a dearth of the sort of games people love to play.  So as Wii console sales drop and game sales fail to keep pace with the other consoles,   Nintendo needs to take a hard look at their business strategy and decide if they are satisfied being the console everybody buys and nobody plays, or whether they need to shake things up.  I vote for the latter.