Sho_Nuff82 said:
Holy fuck at Wii numbers. So much for YoY drops.
The software top 10 is ridiculous as well, but the real meat I want to see is the total software, 3rd party software, YTD software, and some of the games outside of the top 10 - how did the rest of the fall heavy hitters fare?
We can't seriously be arguing that no one has released a Wii game as good as Wii Play or Mario Kart.
Some 3rd party games should be dragged along for the ride by sheer volume surely? Something like 1 in 25 new Wii owners would have to purchase a specific game last month for it to break 100k.
I've said this before, but both Iwata and Reggie use "THERE'S A GIANT FUCKING INSTALL BASE" as a reason,
the reason, to develop on the Wii. Gone is the argument about low development cost, no longer are they saying "Innovative control scheme!" to sell devkits, they are pointing at the install base as their biggest advantage.
Third parties, for whatever reason, take this to mean that simply putting a Wii game out means it should sell. This isn't my assumption, Sega has confirmed this exact logic. They expressed extreme discontent that the Conduit, a maligned game from a shovelware developer, did not sell by sheer virtue of being on the Wii. EA, as misguided as they may have been, was really excited about Dead Space Extraction. The game was pretty damn good. But it released to the toot of a broken horn, not a commercial or advertising campaign to be seen. Meanwhile, EA has been staging fake protests, bribing journalists with food and money, and generally been making an
event about Dante's Inferno, a kind of stupid looking God of War clone that can at best hope to be a black eye to its own name. But it's getting ads, it will get good reviews that are immediately suspect because of all the lead up, and will sell well because of that. Third parties want Wii games to sell because they're on the Wii and does not understand at all why anyone could think differently.
And what can you really do about it? Can Nintendo say "Ignore the install base, we still have last gen graphics and a control scheme equal or worse than the competition"? Can they tell third parties "Yeah, you spend less on making games, but you have to make that up in advertising to maybe sell well, so deal with it"?
Third parties, for all their output on all systems and all the money they're making, are lost. And they don't even realize it. They don't get the problems with the Wii audience not buying their games is a problem they will face next generation. As video games become more ubiquitous in our society, there will continue to be more people who play four games a year and not four a month. Third parties are facing three possible options: either the gaming market stays exactly the same forever, it shrinks, or it expands to people who don't identify as gamers.
Unless third parties - and this means Sega, Capcom, and the rest who pride themselves on broad appeal and not hardcore otakuness like NIS and Atlus - understand what they're doing wrong, no install base or graphics will save them.