| Gamerace said: @brainbox - You are definately onto something there! I can just imagine how many more copies of Endless Ocean would have sold if you could shoot those dolphins and spear some sharks. And if you get to shoot at Mii's playing Wii Music then a lot of people on this site will definately pick that up too, especially if it was all online and you could goto anyone else's Wii and randomly pillage their Wii Music bands. |
Well it's not as simple as that. As Rol already pointed out, casual games already sell exceptionally well on the Wii. That's because casual gamers have a different standard for covers. They're attracted to colorful non-threatening entertaining activity focused covers.
If you put a bunch of Mii's with guns on this cover, you might have attracted more core gamers, but you probably would have frightened away a lot of casual gamers too. It's a fine line. I only scratched the surface in my original post. Someone with a gun may be the most important thing to find on a game cover for hardcore gamers, but there are other factors to consider. Like is how cool the gun(s) looks, or how badass the people carrying those guns are. Let's look at another Midway game, this one aimed at hardcore gamers.
Well the guns are okay, but Chow Yun-Fat, just doesn't look very bad ass. He's not a marine, a space marine, or a gansta, so that hurts this cover. The Blur makes everything softer and less threatening, and therefore less hardcore. Because of all this, Stranglehold didn't sell very well, even though the cover has a guy with guns on it. Midway made sure to fix this problem with Game Party. They studied Nintendo's Casual Game Covers and copied them exactly, ensuring strong sales in the casual market.
Now, if you're particularly crafty, you can make a cover that might attract people from both crowds, while not alienating them both. For that, let's go back to GTA publisher, Take Two, master of high selling cover art.
Obviously the cover aims at the casual crowd, and succeeds. Numerous colorful non-threatening activities are there, but what else is there? Targets and clown balloon pops? Things you shoot with guns. It's very subtle, and therefore not going to reel in many hardcore gamers, but it did pull in a lot of casuals, and just enough hardcore to put it above every other third-party mini-game collection on the Wii. (Excluding the cluster fuck of licensed mascots cover that is Mario and Sonic Olympics, one of which is 1st party)
EDIT: Upon further analysis, it’s obvious again Nintendo knows this better than anyone. Wii Play covers the ideal casual gamer cover perfectly, yet also alludes to guns, and shooting things with them by showing targets, ducks, and tanks shooting things.
Again, subtle, but less so than Carnival games, and more effective. I misspoke when I said Midway copied Nintendo’s covers perfectly, Game Party does not allude to guns or shooting, and this is why Carnival Games is beating it by a very wide margin.
