I’m a lifelong Nintendo fanboy. I grew up with the NES and SNES. During the first 3D console war in the mid-90′s, I sided with the Nintendo 64 despite missing out on many, many great games until years later. I was optimistic for the Wii, and the DS completely won me over. That said, I’ve realized something about Nintendo that I think always floated around in the back of my mind, but that I didn’t really accept until the WiiU was announced.

Nintendo doesn’t care about wooing hardcore gamers. Yes, jaded gamers think this is self-evident, but it’s actually worse than it seems. Nintendo doesn’t care about wooing hardcore gamers because we’ll come back to them anyway. That is the truly terrible thing about Nintendo’s current strategy. It doesn’t matter how disappointing their hardware is, how inept their handling of online services is, or how much they bother to build a platform that third party developers actually feel like using to make a decent game and not just a half-assed semi-port.

Let me be crude but concise. Nintendo is our cheating ex-girlfriend who, every six months or so, calls us up at 2:00 a.m. looking for action. And, because we are idiots and she does that one thing we like, we come over. Maybe it’s a one-night stand, maybe it’s a short rekindling of the relationship, but it always ends with her completely ignoring us and sleeping with our little brother.

Since the last generation of game systems, we’ve gotten used to a few things. Specifically, steadily improving graphics that, at this point, are high-definition, and a comprehensive online service that allows matchmaking and organization across multiple games. The WiiU will, in fact, have some form of HD video. However, Nintendo hasn’t actually said what it will be able to do, or even released any sort of specs on the system’s hardware. The WiiU might have 1080p graphics. It might be as powerful as a PlayStation 3. The problem is we don’t know, and the fact that Nintendo hasn’t bothered to tell us anything shows us that they really don’t care. Graphics aren’t a priority.

More importantly, Nintendo hasn’t announced any online service, meaning online gaming with the newest Nintendo system will remain somewhere between atrocious and unusable. We have Steam. We have Xbox Live. We have PlayStation Network. In all of these services, hooking up with a friend and playing any multiplayer game together is a question of three button presses and a manner of seconds. With Nintendo, you have friend codes, individual games using different multiplayer systems, and an ordeal involving IMing or phone tag just to get into a damn Super Smash Bros. game with your friend.

I don’t care about the excuses. It’s 2011, and “But the kids will be pedophiled by e-predators!” is a pretty goddamn weak excuse for not offering a service that every other major gaming platform offers. We shouldn’t have to rely on EA for matchmaking with EA games, THQ for matchmaking with THQ games, and all of that vaguely connected through a kitbashed messaging system we devise with our friends just so we can game together. Nintendo needs to get into this decade and actually offer something.

Oh, and the multiple Nintendo eStores suck. Why? Well, for starters, they’re multiple goddamn eStores. I need different cards depending on whether I want to buy games on my 3DS or my Wii/DSi. Meanwhile, with the PlayStation Network (even after the month-long humiliating downtime), I can get one card for points I can use for both my PS3 and PSP. Oh, and there are plenty of games I can use with both my PS3 and PSP. Has Nintendo offered any explanation for why the 3DS can’t play NES games (besides the “3D Classics” we’re promised, of which we’ve only seen Excitebike so far), or SNES games, or Genesis games, or any Wii Virtual Console game? Both systems can clearly handle it. Hell, there’s little reason why the DSi can’t handle it. Nintendo could have taken the PlayStation model, smoothly transferring purchases and certain low-end (two- or three-generation-old games and older) titles between the home console and the portable system. They just didn’t.

Instead, we have three different stores for three different systems, with a back catalog of DSi downloads for the 3DS (but if you have a DSi or DSi XL, don’t expect a simple or easy way to get your current games on your 3DS). That’s not even getting into the organization issues of any of the eStores, and how they’re laid out horribly. From a purely technical and economic standpoint, Nintendo’s stores are a collective mess. And, sadly, a mess is the only thing they are collectively.

Here’s the kicker: Nintendo clearly doesn’t care. Yes, they talk about downloadable games and how the WiiU will have an “HD experience,” but they don’t bother to actually put together something worthwhile to gamers. Why? Because Nintendo doesn’t care about gamers anymore. Nintendo has found that the big bucks are in casual users. Families. Kids. The real money’s in the friendly, brightly-colored games that grandparents can set their grandchildren down in front of, and that moms and dads can play in between work. Nintendo has become a family company, and the tastes and desires of Generation Y gamers, the obsessive gamers who grew up with Nintendo and still carry a torch for the company, just don’t matter.

That doesn’t mean Nintendo has given up on our money, though. They just realized that they don’t have to work as hard for it as Microsoft or Sony do. And the worst thing is that it’s not entirely Nintendo’s fault. Its ours for always coming back in enough numbers that they don’t have to care.When a new Mario, Zelda, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, or Metroid (though maybe not after Other M, but fortunately Kid Icarus is coming back to make up for that pile of crap) game comes out, we pick it up. If we don’t have the console, we pick that up too. We know they’ll be great (well, there are a few exceptions… like Other M), we grew up with these titles, we love the entire series, it’s a given that we’re going to get them. As long as Nintendo makes those few games, they basically have our money.

Every gamer who grew up with Nintendo, every die-hard fanboy, every spurned fan who swore he’d turn away from Nintendo except for just that one game is, sadly, Nintendo’s bitch. The company doesn’t have to offer the same power or convenience or enjoyable, comprehensive experience that Sony and Microsoft have to offer to keep our attention. Neither company has characters that we literally grew up with. Neither company is a brand name we’ve embraced as a fixture since we were children. Our nostalgia for Nintendo’s properties is so deep-seated that the company simply doesn’t have to bother, besides putting out new games based on them in a semi-regular basis.

Nintendo left us for families. And it still gets our money because, when it inevitably calls in the early morning, we still pick up the phone.