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Nintendo has always been the games company that puts fun above all else, sometimes at the expense of innovation, graphics, and moving the game industry forward. In that sense, you could say that Nintendo is the casual gamer to the hardcore gamer folk at Sony and Microsoft.

This generation has seen the casual gamer tag being applied to the Nintendo consoles more than ever, because both the Wii and DS have a much wider range of appeal than their competitors the PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360. But despite being inherently and unashamedly casual in their intent, I thought Nintendo would at least respect the more hardcore amongst us. But it seems not after comments from Nintendo of Europe managing director of marketing Laurent Fischer prove.

In an article about Wiiware, the downloadable games store for the Wii which features hundreds of small but highly playable games, NextGen.biz revealed that Fischer referred to the storage space problems on the Wii by saying how “geeks and otaku” were the only people who would want the issue addressed.

As much as Fischer may deride the problem, it is a problem, and for more than just the geeks and otaku which he was referring to. The Wii doesn’t come with a sizeable hard drive like the PS3 and Xbox 36, instead you have to play your games off SD cards, and that limits the amount of content you can keep on the console quite severely.

Fischer has since issued an apology of sorts, saying:

“I have huge respect for those who, like me, share a common passion for Nintendo and want to make it clear that I would never use and I didn’t use this terminology in such a context or way to cause offence. I regret that this misunderstanding has created such offence and disappointment within the community.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that this issue was raised now, even if it was in the utterly retarded and disrespectful way Fischer did it, as it means Nintendo can start thinking about solutions for the Wii storage problems which are going to start affecting more and more people (including casual gamers) as the amount of Wiiware and Virtual Console content grows.