What is the market chatter on the resistance to digital? Is it the inability to re-sell games? Or is it pre-sale bonuses?
Right now, it looks like the biggest barrier is the more mass market consumer just not being super aware of how digital purchasing really works. I don't know if I'd call it resistance really. Adoption has been faster than was forecast. Don't really have enough data for anyone to know the behavior drivers of what's going on quite yet.
It seems like the digital presale DLC is the first step being taken to entice people to go digital, combined with the convenience of preloading.
Yep. To be fair, two years ago digital sales were maybe handled by one person in an org. They were an afterthought. as digital shares were low single digit %. A lot has changed in two years for sure. It's evolving.
Would a digital re-sale program work in any manner? The way I think about it, you could trade in your digital license for store credit at market prevailing prices (difficult to determine I know) and this credit can be used to buy other games or media. This would allow each of the consoles to keep the money spent off the secondary market, while enabling additional purchases (ie. licensing fees). If the gamer wants to play the game again, they must purchase it from the store (possible double dip). While there will be some people whom use it as a cheap rental, I would think the margin on the digital sale will help alleviate some of that.
Controversial statement time... but the consumer backlash to the Xbox One original plan has either killed this idea or postponed it for many, many years. This kind of digital license trade in program was being discussed across retailers and publishers up until the policy reversal. A major US games specialty retailer wants this to happen, but it is not getting much traction these days. But yeah, that backlash made clear that consumers aren't ready for this. Maybe they will be someday, but it's not being actively pursued that I know of.
I think the big concern would be around annoying the brick and mortar outlets, but I think pricing the digital resale at 5%-10% less may smooth it over a little.
If this kind of program were to happen, it would be in conjunction with brick & mortar, at least in the short to mid-term future.
Okay, fine. If this is your position -- that these teams simply could not possibly be asked to make a Wii game -- then you are implicitly admitting in very clear terms that publishers did not try everything could, or even close to it, which was the premise of this discussion in the first place.
Was thinking about this more last night... So the top-tier talent you mention. These people are, like you say, the best at what they do. As such, they do have a lot of power in determining what they develop, outside of some general direction (ie it's an Assassin's Creed game).
Infinity Ward, for example, were the drivers behind taking COD4 into modern day. Activision management wanted COD4 to continue in the WW2 setting. But, because IW was so good at what they did, and had such influence, they determined what they were actually going to make, which was Modern Warfare. And I don't see, in any way, how someone like IW could have been forced to make a Wii game unless they really wanted to.
Keeping top tier development talent happy is not easy. And if that top tier talent really wanted to work on the Wii, I think they would have been able to. It's not just a question of deploying resources when you're talking about the top tier dev talent.
As to the metacritic question, it's really tough.
I did a big writeup on launch window MC scores, but the trend held. Wii games were scored lower than PS3/X360, with a lower average, and lower incidence rate of 80+ scores.
1,193 third party physical games were released on the Wii, compared with 1,027 PS3 games and 1,180 Xbox 360 games. Sample size alone would lead one to believe that some hits would come out of 1,193 titles beyond Just Dance, Guitar Hero, Epic Mickey and the LEGO games. It just didn't work out that way. The best-selling "core" title was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which ranked only in the top 30 3rd party games.
If you want to say that 3rd parties proved incompetent in figuring out the Wii more traditional games market, I'd agree. And while I'll concede that the best of the best talent wise may not have been applied to Wii development, I'd argue that doing so would have been very difficult. While "doing all they could do" seems to be a sticking point definition, perhaps I'd change that to say 3rd parties made a reasonable attempt to succeed in that market. They just, for the most part, failed.
