Was the 2009 demographic shift actually "successful"?

[MasonThe2nd]

So if you don't already know, Bandai decided to go full-on girly with Tamagotchi starting around 2009 with the iD (coincidentally around the time Japan went into its idol craze), and it has been like that since (though to a much lesser degree). It seems sometime before or after the anime got canceled, Tamagotchi slowly became irrelevant and less popular.

I've speculated it's somehow due in part to Bandai forcing the franchise to hop onto newer trends in the hopes to keep it relevant, but in doing so made it less relevant in the long run.

I rant about it in this video (), but I wanna hear your guys' thoughts and maybe confirm if I'm right or not.

 

[Bentobuff]

I'm not sure exactly why but it jumped to around the 28 minute mark when I loaded the video in the app (^～^)ゞ

That said I'll give it a watch! I love this sort of in depth analysis

 

[Penguin-keeper]

I don't know how things worked out in Japan, but I think that we can see pretty clearly at this point that the shift away from being gender-neutral has held the brand back from becoming as big as it once was in the West. When new releases come along, we often see comments here on TamaTalk suggesting that at least half the potential market (usually guys who often, but not always, grew up with the originals or the Connection line) might feel put-off and alienated by the current approach. I'm female, and often find myself in that group because I've never found girly-girl stuff to be appealing - I originally got into Tamagotchi partly because its appeal overlapped with my other hobbies of video games and computing, and it reflected the general cute-but-weird nature of a lot of Japanese-made Game Boy games of that era.

That said, it must be a profitable approach, or else Bandai wouldn't keep doing it - we don't have their data, and fan-sites are naturally going to be something of an echo-chamber at times, especially in a hobby that's shrunk as much as this one.

 

[MasonThe2nd]

I'm not sure exactly why but it jumped to around the 28 minute mark when I loaded the video in the app (^～^)ゞ

That said I'll give it a watch! I love this sort of in depth analysis

That was intentional

I don't know how things worked out in Japan, but I think that we can see pretty clearly at this point that the shift away from being gender-neutral has held the brand back from becoming as big as it once was in the West. When new releases come along, we often see comments here on TamaTalk suggesting that at least half the potential market (usually guys who often, but not always, grew up with the originals or the Connection line) might feel put-off and alienated by the current approach. I'm female, and often find myself in that group because I've never found girly-girl stuff to be appealing - I originally got into Tamagotchi partly because its appeal overlapped with my other hobbies of video games and computing, and it reflected the general cute-but-weird nature of a lot of Japanese-made Game Boy games of that era.

That said, it must be a profitable approach, or else Bandai wouldn't keep doing it - we don't have their data, and fan-sites are naturally going to be something of an echo-chamber at times, especially in a hobby that's shrunk as much as this one.

Not to mention the Tamagotchi Friends (which was Bandai's first attempt to bring the anime to an American audience) flopped in sales so that's really saying something.