The Untapped Potential of Casino Games on the Wii U
There’s nothing more casual than a card game.
For many of today’s more mature gamers, they can trace their roots back to playing casual games on their parents’ personal computers – long nights spent trying to figure out how to play Minesweeper, or even the endless shuffling of cards on Solitaire and rejoicing once the cards did that dance of theirs after a successful run. It was games like these that first piqued our interest, even before we discovered console gaming.
We’ve seen these games make one hell of a comeback with the introduction of mobile gaming, as more intuitive controls made room for more enjoyable casual gaming experiences, and it wasn’t long before the Wii U gave us the strangest gift of all: the convenience and feel of mobile games, but on a more powerful console. But for all intents and purposes, the Wii U has been a dramatic failure. It failed to make a splash, failed to truly differentiate itself from the Wii, and failed to bring new gamers to Nintendo’s doors.
Much of this comes from the fact that the Wii U was incredibly underplayed, and it tried to tap into the market that they had already sucked dry with the Wii. As Gavin Cramblet so succinctly explains in a Quora response documented on Forbes, “the Wii tapped into an undiscovered market. But that market fulfilled its needs elsewhere and evolved with the times. When the Wii U tried to tap into it a second time, it missed. Badly.”
But surely there are other markets out there that have yet to be tapped into, and one in particular could hold the key to the revival of the Wii U: casino gaming. Online gambling has been growing steadily since the launch of Intercasino in 1996, as CryptoLogic developed secure encryption for their games and paved the way for online transactions to be made possible. By the end of this year, online gambling across the globe is expected to reach a market value of $41.4 billion, yet we see much of this gambling being done on computers, and in some select mobile apps – never on consoles.
Of course, gambling centric games have always been attempted on other platforms, only to have them fail miserably. But the Wii U has something that none of them have: the GamePad. Dan Adelman, former head of downloadable content for Nintendo, said in a response on Ask.fm, that “The value of the GamePad hasn’t been justified”, and it hasn’t. The potential for casino games presented by the GamePad is monumental, as even land-based casino developers such as Bally Technologies have created games that make touchscreen interaction the highlight of the experience, such as their popular All That Jazz game, which allows players to play a piano in the bonus round.
Of course, what the Wii U really needs is more developers willing to take on the challenge of turning casino games into great games for the console. A downloadable version of the classic 1993 SNES game Vegas Stakes was made available on the Wii U, and RCMADIAX also created a game called Poker Dice Solitaire Future, yet this fails to capture the authentic casino experience. It’s a well of untapped potential, and could be the genre the Wii U needs.
