I must admit, that against most of my calculations, im still unable to properly gauge the success of certain wii games. Im refferring to realize what exactly wants the core wii owner, the old school gamer portion of the wii market.Its fair to admit we "gamespot" posters have little to no bearing if we compare our tastes with the average wii owner. Thats why Carnival and most of my Sims games sold so well, despite most of us didn`t buy those.So most wii owners are different than lets say, internet wii savyy owners.
Ok lets try to crack up why some game sell and some dont, because this year was a bit of a puzzle to me...getting the facts out first: -Nintendo 1st party games sell, no brainer. Wide appeal, family friendly, famous characters, insta buy, really. Metroid is less family friendly but its marketted properly.However i must add, Corruption sales were on par with Red Steel. And COD outsold rather quickly Corruption. To summarize, a third party game outsold a first party core game. Not that Corruption sold bad , but not as fast and good as Call of Duty World at War(which wasnt even console exclusive by any means).Right here we got a contention issue. A first party game selling worse than a similarly scoring third party? Samus not as popular?or it was the lack of online content?Figure it out.
-Core mature games DO sell. Third party. This is proven by a couple of onrail shooters, COD series which are more violent than the Cube(and also managed higher sales than the Cube COD`s ).Resident evil 4 (cube game), got similar sales than the old game despite no visual upgrades or pretty much any upgrade besides controls and bonuses. No More Heroes managed a sequel as well,with moderate sales. So , definitively, some do sell. Even tho it took a bit for NMH. To this point i was pretty much confident quality was a seller with mature titles(at Wii). Even less stellar games like Bully (a ps2 port) did sucessfully eventually and Quantum of Solace pulled through.What about the Conduit?sales are steady , we are up around 300,000 units and growing. For a flawed effort(lets face it, is not really very good), its going just fine.In fact most mature titles were doing fine! surprise there.
-But then this year. Well, tenchu was released, with a moderate gamerakings/metacritc. (6.9), although i personally enjoy terribly much. It had dismal sales of less than 100k over nearly a year. it was a big dissapointment. -Madworld. It sold under expectations. Fortunately, it managed to grow some legs and maintain enough reception to get the recent Sega statement. That they will keep trying to "crack" the core market. Good enough.
-House of the Dead OK pulled good numbers and Sega was happy. The onrail game outsold the Third person action game. Point taken.(Not as good as the 2&3 combo but climbing nicely). -Cursed mountain: the estimates are particularly bad. I expected low, but 50k low ?thats less than the conduit first week or 2. A third person good game with very dismal returns.
-Deadly Creatures: Yet another third person quality adventure with a mature style.And yet among the biggest failures. Price drops kept this amazing product afloat, but the 100k reception (in 9 months) is not good. THQ was dissapointed, although the sales did picked up afterwards.But it was after a cut.
-And now, Dead Space. While it started better than Tenchu 4, and Cursed Mountain,thats still not much to say. The game had much higher production values(Hours of spoken dialogue, and the highest resolution graphics on the wii to date-much much higher detail than ANY wii game), its obvious that this game had quite the budget unlike, lets say Segas Madworld or HOTD(its, after all, an "interactive cinematic experience" opposed to UC or GS). Like THQ, Visceral was baffled with the results. While some argue that "oh, it would have done better if it was third person" , i reply:" And why every other mature third person game bombed worse?. So i dont think it has to do with genre by any means. Although, in all fairness, i think Visceral shouldn`t call it quits yet, as the game is still new and many mature games do pick up over time. Besides, the game distrubution was quite slow and many stores didnt get it until a couple of weeks. So lets see how it goes. Im aware that Darkside will do fine , as well as COD reflex, not sure about the numbers, but certainly the buzz for both games is big. In fact, im shocked at the inmense fan reaction to COD Reflex despite it being old, and having little developer asisted hype(unlike Conduit).
Basically i want to seek your educated, non biased, non fanboyist opinion(is pointless anyway ,as we are an obvious fraction of the core market), on what the core owner buys and doesn´t on the wii. What do they want?(beside the COD and other games that broke through).Sorry about the long text.
PD:this was a post i made, but this way i think is better to keep it up