With all of the press from EA, Valve, etc. of late with their typical "We should pay more attention to the Wii", I see lots of bad things happening to gaming in the not so distant future.
Think about it: Game publishers are purely looking at this from a "how many consoles will company X have in the next 2-3 years" and they have a very flawed logic about this. They see the Wii as this cash cow, but a cash cow for who? The NPD numbers clearly show that the Wii, having at LEAST the same number of consoles out there as the 360, sells less than half as many games. Why is that? Because casuals rarely buy games. Because Hardcore gamers don't buy 5 hour minigames for $50.
Yet the corporate idiots at EA, Valve, Ubisoft, etc. pay attention to attach rates, the real measure of sales potential, about as much as they pay attention to the gamers themselves (hint: not very much).
Look, I like my Wii, and I hope to actually have fun games to play on it one day (besides wii sports). But I don't like it so much that I'd rather have game publishers force developers to work on Wii games over the 360 or even PS3. Why? Because yeah I might be in the minority who can afford to buy 2 or more $60 games every month, own a 100" HDTV projector, and have 7.1 surround, but damn Nintendo if they force the industry to water down the development on higher performance consoles.
MrEpyx
This stuff about casuals buying less games is BS.
Resident Evil 4, Mario Party 8, Super Paper Mario, Legend of Zelda, Wii Play, Wii Sports, Dragon Quest Swords (Japan), Red Steel, and soon to be Metroid Prime 3 have sold over a million copies. Maybe Wario Ware too.
But thats 8 for sure million selling games in 8 months.
Hmm, casuals don't buy games. "well they buy kiddy games not hardcore games!"
Hello, Super Paper Mario is a very good platformer/RPG that is by no means easy or casual. Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest games of all time and by no means the definition of your "casual", Legend of Zelda is in no way casual, Metroid Prime 3, well if you say thats casual you are a anti-wii fanboy.
DQ Swords in Japan has been selling very well. It is by no means a casual game. Its based of the tried and true RPG franchise of the same name.
And for better or worse Red Steel is not a casual game. You can't casually play that. You must have patience and be able to put up with alot of holes though there is brightspots.
I look forward to Valve's future Wii projects and its just a matter of time until everyone starts to realize that though they don't take the Wii seriously, the developers are taking notice.
I mean Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Godfather, Scarface, were all games GameCube wouldn't have gotten.
And do you think devs would make Zack & Wiki, Guitar Hero 3, No More Heroes, Manhunt 2, Bully for the GameCube either?
Log in to comment