Stop addressing them as “normies” would be a great start.
Can’t speak for rest of the Fediverse as I’m not super active on microblogging anymore, but at least here on Lemmy, there is such a strong “in” culture and quirky skewed perception of the world, and often times come off as actively hostile against those that do not share the same quirky skewed world view. The anti-AI, anti-corporate, would rather shoot myself in the foot if it’s not FOSS, etc kind of views, with their own strong vocal proponents, comes off as unwelcoming. People are addicted to socials because of the positivity they can get, not the negative sentiments that’s often echo’ed.
Amongst those that doesn’t share the kind of view, you’d already be looking at an extreme small minority that might be willing to give the platform a try, but as long as the skewed perception of the world dominates the discussions, you can expect them to go back to main stream centralized platforms where they can get more main stream view points based discussions.
Another possibility: the console vendors are catching whiff of the whole gate keeper mess, and they don’t want to be at risk of being forced to open up their physical cartridge DRM mechanisms to allow third party cartridges for the relatively small EU market (compared to the rest of the world). Moving towards digital is much easier as result.
It is also clear as day that they’re testing the waters with Nintendo players who are generally deemed to be more casual, and lesser likely to push back compared to the more savvy other major consoles. Once this blows over, they will just move to digital everything across the board, citing successes and cost savings on the other platforms as basis for the move.