Ever since E3, we started getting the impression that the 3DS was going to be a slightly different beast than the DS line, possibly geared a bit more towards an older, core gaming crowd. Certainly the initial software shown (Resident Evil, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter, Metal Gear, Ghost Recon, etc.) would seem to back up this notion. At the 3DS event in New York, we asked Nintendo if it's deliberately looking to change its target audience with the 3DS.
"We know right at launch that the people that will be most interested in buying the 3DS are people that have been buying previous versions of the DS, that are Nintendo loyalists, and people that are core gamers. There was a perception years back that we were somehow moving away from that crowd, and not making games that catered to that crowd, and that’s absolutely not true. With this launch, we especially wanted to make games for them and give them what they wanted," Charlie Scibetta, Sr. Director, Corp. Comm. for Nintendo of America explained to us.
He added that Nintendo, of course, is looking to appeal to everyone, however. "What’s our target audience down the line? It’s really all ages, both male and female, because we certainly have the software support from third parties, and then from our own first party development to make games that appeal to everybody. We don’t feel that you have to concentrate on one segment at the expense of the other," he said.
"As more and more content rolls in, from ourselves and from our third party partners, you’re going to see stuff that scales all the way across the line from core to casual and all those different genres that we talked about on stage. You’re seeing a taste of that here. We’ve got thirty-plus games coming out between March 27th and E3. We think we’re going to have stuff for everybody. We did try to really have games that would appeal to core gamers, especially from our third-party partners."
