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Latest Nintendo Direct ushers in an age of Wii nostalgia

If 2021 was the year of the Game Boy Advance renaissance, then 2022 is the year of the Wii. At this point, the Nintendo Switch has outsold the Wii, but it still doesn’t feel like the Switch is as ubiquitous with casual gamers as the Wii was. Meanwhile, the Wii is getting just old enough that it’s starting to feel nostalgic and retro.

If Nintendo wants to continue to grow the Switch’s userbase, these yearnful Wii fans need to be its next target. Perhaps that’s why the latest Nintendo Direct felt like a love letter to the Wii era by featuring games like Nintendo Switch Sports, Mario Strikers: Battle League, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. 

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Nintendo Direct - 2.9.2022

Let’s go bowling

At this point, most hardcore gaming fans who want a Nintendo Switch likely already own one. While those 100+ million players will continue to buy new video games, Nintendo still wants to sell 23 million more units this year alone. If it’s going to accomplish that, it needs to entice people who might not usually play video games or spend hundreds of dollars on a new system. 

Nintendo was the most successful at doing this during the Wii era but moved away from this casual focus after the Wii U flopped. Focusing on its hardcore fans is what made the Nintendo Switch a runaway success right at launch, but we’re now almost five years in, and Nintendo is looking to maintain a growing audience. 

Making the Nintendo Switch even more appealing to casuals and non-gamers seems to be the company’s next goal. Nintendo Switch Sports recapturing some of that Wii magic is the spearhead of this strategy.

Its predecessor Wii Sports is one of the most successful games of all time. Even people who’ve never played a video game might remember the game from the Wii’s heyday. Nintendo wants a Switch in every nursing home, school, or daycare if it isn’t all ready, and first-party titles like Nintendo Switch Sports make that a possibility.

If the game catches on with casual gamers and Nintendo makes it a bundled Switch game, there’s a chance that this could be the Switch’s next Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or Animal Crossing: New Horizons from a sales perspective.

Nintendo Switch Sports key art showcases the Joy-Cons being used for various sports.

Wii Remember

Believe it or not, the Wii is over 15 years old. Young kids who played games on the Wii with their parents are now adults and likely have nostalgia for those experiences. Some may even consider it to be a retro console at this point. As such, it’s not surprising that Nintendo and other companies would dip back into the well of Wii-era IPs. It started with the Skyward Sword remaster last year, but several Wii-related announcements were in this Nintendo Direct too, which made it a real trip for those of us that grew up with these games on Wii.

Mario Strikers’ last great outing was on the Wii, and the sports spin-off series has been dormant for just long enough to where Nintendo fans are delighted that it’s making a grand return. Even Nintendo Switch Sports will trigger nostalgia for the millions of people who enjoyed it over 15 years ago.

Third parties are even taking notice. Aspyr decided to specifically remaster the Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which is an odd choice considering that a more polished version of the game existed for Xbox 360 and PS3. Still, the Switch is the only console capable of preserving that Wii experience, and Aspyr ensures that the Wii port doesn’t get lost to time. For players who enjoyed the Wii but don’t want to dig out their system, sensor bar, and some Wii Remotes, releases like this will allow them to satiate their nostalgia. 

While games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 indicate that Nintendo isn’t abandoning its hardcore audience, it’s clear that the casual market is the Switch’s next great frontier. Many of the games featured in the February 9 Direct capitalize on a new wave of nostalgia for the Wii. Embracing that market and those causal players with these games might be the key to the Nintendo Switch’s continued success. 

Editors' Recommendations

Sea of Stars’ unique RPG combat has already won me over
Zale and Valere from Sea of Stars

When I first started up the new demo for Sea of Stars, the upcoming indie RPG that draws inspiration from classics like Chrono Trigger, I wasn't hooked after my first battle. Its combat system confused me at first, with shifting type weaknesses and a mana pool that somehow felt like it was only an inch deep. Only after I read about the combat in-depth did I learn to appreciate its quirks, like its signature "lock" system. If only it teased a more emotionally gripping story, I'd be convinced it's worth playing from the start to end.

Sabotage Studio’s latest project serves as a prequel to its other game, The Messenger. Our heroes, Zale and Valere, are the only ones capable of using Eclipse Magic, a special power capable of defeating the Fleshmancer’s monsters. It's up to the two protagonists to stop their foe with their combined powers -- something that Sabotage takes care to highlight in the demo with the aforementioned combat.
C-combo breaker!
Sea of Stars blends just the right amount of traditional and modern gameplay in its battles. Players can directly choose if a character attacks, casts a spell, or uses an item during their turn. Each character has a mana bar that refills whenever they use their normal attacks, as well as skills that they can cast when they have enough MP. Ideally, the player should take advantage of type weaknesses. Attacks charge a combo meter that lets characters use dual attacks, which sometimes hit more weaknesses than the characters can on their own.

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Metroid Prime 4: Release date prediction, trailers, gameplay, and more
Samus holding cube in Metroid Dread.

One of Nintendo's lesser-known yet still beloved franchises is Metroid -- a series that originally began on the NES, putting us in the shoes of bounty hunter Samus Aran. Now, over 35 years later, fans are eagerly awaiting the next entry in the series, Metroid Prime 4, which has been in the works for several years.

The Prime series takes the formula introduced in the 2D games and turns it into a 3D, first-person adventure that still very much feels like Metroid, despite the perspective shift.

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Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo
Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years. 
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward. 
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." 
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?  
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision? 
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened. 

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