Why developers keep tarring and feathering themselves

There is a very interesting article written by a man named Sean Malstrom, titled Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy, about Nintendo’s disruption strategy, and how other developers are misinterpreting both Nintendo’s strategy, and recent patterns in gaming.

In simple terms, Nintendo’s plan is to first get non-gamers, infrequent gamers, and lapsed gamers playing their systems, then gradually moving these new gamers up from the simpler, ‘casual’ games towards the complex, ‘hardcore’ games. Meanwhile, other developers are failing to understand Nintendo’s strategy, and instead think that Nintendo’s success has come from some casual ‘fad’ that those developers want a piece of. When these other developers then fail with their casual titles, they blame it on Nintendo’s dominance on their platforms, claiming that third-party games don’t sell on Nintendo’s platforms.