| mike_intellivision said: I wonder if this will -- unforutnately -- lead to a revival of the old "third party software can't sell on the Wii" postings. |
A meme has to die down before it can be revived...
Of course third-party software can't sell --when it is of poor quality. That has been the rub.
Mike from Morgantown
Actually, I find myself surprised to say that I disagree with this statement. If you're referring to the third-party thing as a proportional thing (i.e. 1st party Nintendo games sell disproportionately more than 1st party Sony/Microsoft ones) then a simple glance at the data quickly refutes it.
If, however, you're referring to the level of sales for third-party games in general as being more spread out than HD games, I actually disagree quite fervently. I'll admit I haven't completely fleshed out this idea yet, but I'm starting to think that the distribution of third-party Wii game sales has less to do with "effort" than it does with "targeting."
By this, I mean that many more HD games know that they have a fairly consolidated audience. The gaming tastes of the 13-25 male is quite well-known (trained?) by now, and that group tends to act in easily recognized blocs that often act in concert. Thus, publishers know that there is currently a very large group of HD gamers who are fans of shooters, and that they can reasonably tailor their game to appeal to this crowd in the hope that they get more buzz than their competitors (the fact that the majority fail the last part is a topic for another day).
The same can be said of groups like JRPG fans, sports sim fans, etc.: publishers have a fairly good idea of how large the group is, and how to appeal to this group to get as much of their money as possible. And since these blocs tend to congregate via print and online media, and consequently generally act in herds, those gamers tend to flock towards the two or three games that their fellow afficianados are raving about this quarter. This means that while most of the games released in that genre will fail, a handful will rise to enough success that attention is drawn towards them, giving the illusion of health.
By contrast, I'm starting to think that Wii owners are nowhere near as monolithic as their HD counterparts. While there are quite a few of us who also keep up on gaming news and opinion via magazines and the internet, I would argue that we're proportionally smaller than our HD counterparts. Instead, a far higher amount of Wii gamers are people who aren't as focused on gaming as their hobby. This may explain why internet forums in general do not contain a representative sample of gamers; for instance, the folks who "non-games" are aimed at don't come around these parts (which is why their tastes are pointlessly mocked and ridiculed), but they form a large and growing portion of the gaming population.
The consequences of this is that the Wii audience is much more diverse in its tastes. We tend to cluster less, and spread out the buying power through more genres and individual games. This results in the curious phenomenom we've been seeing: Wii games, third-party in particular, are much less likely to go multi-platinum than their HD counterparts, but by the same token they're much less likely to flop either. The diverse, non-fanatic userbase also doesn't rush to buy the game in its first week, but purchases new stuff on its own sweet time.
This also explains why, when the top 10/20/30 lists are released by the NPD et. al., third-party Wii games are less likely to ever show up, but when the year-end results appear the uninformed are stunned to see that third-parties on the Wii sold more than first-and-third parties on the PS3/360.
To summarize: the Wii audience does not vote or act in large clumps, but goes for disperse games and genres. They are much less likely to congregate around single titles (with some very notable exceptions...), and because of this diversity I'm skeptical that a sudden increase in effort by third-parties will lead to a proportionate increase in their sales: they might entice tens of thousands more people in, but too many Wii owners simply won't be interested in that genre and will not have the internet to hype them about a product they're not naturally interested in.
I originally wrote a few more paragraphs about how I would approach the Wii as a third-party, but I not only realized that I was going off-topic but that I was rambling as well. Sleep deprivation does that to you. To be honest, I'm a bit scared to go back and read what I just wrote. Let me know if it makes any sense; I'll look at it again in the morning, when the hallucinations have ended (or at least are now artificially induced), and I'm guessing we'll all just have a good laugh and forget I ever wrote the damn thing.
