The latest Nintendo Voice chat podcast vocalized something I think alot of us have been thinking as the release of Mad World and the Conduit rapidly approach. These two games are of incredible importance to the wii's future. They are both games targetted at the core crowd, built from the ground up by teams of great promise, with high budgets (for wii games anway), with a considerable amount of internet buzz around them. These are the core games core gamers with wii's have been waiting for.
Third parties and publishers DO pay attention to the sales of other games. Call them stupid, call them ignorant, call them whatever you want but the marketing teams at publishers don't care about good games, they care about games that sell. They care about low risk high reward propositions. They do use games that sell poorly to a particular demographic as an excuse not to publish like games. They don't care if there was one or two successes if they are amidst a pile of failures and they don't care if those failures were crappy games. They are only looking at dollar signs and bottom lines. People that work for development companies will tell you this is so. This is why the wii gets 100 party games for every decent Tenchu 4. Low risk, high reward. It's why Winter was passed up, it's why the conduit initially couldn't find a publisher until IGN broke the story and built some buzz. Other companies are looking at these Sega published games to see how the market reacts. If one or both of them do poorly it could signal to third parties and publishers to continue the 100-1 ratio of petz to Fragile, it will signal to Sega to publish less risky games. If one or both succeed it could give them all the confidence to start developing and publishing games that are actually interesting and appeal to the traditional gamer.
Now the big question is, what is success for these games? What would send a signal that there is a sizable core audience on wii starved for exciting experiences?
Personally, I'm going to go with the arbitrary big round number. I think if they can both become million sellers quickly then they will be deemed successes for the core gamer. Notice the caveat there, quickly. They can't cross the million mark sometime next year and end up on a list under Mysims 3 that reached a million two months after release. If the conduit can manage to be a very multiplayer centric game that gets good word of mouth for fun online play I think it can easily cross that and hopefully reach 2 million. Online play extends legs drastically and if it could become the wii's COD4/Halo 3/inevitably Killzone 2, it's "go to" online game of note, then it could be a great success. But I think in order to even peak publishers interest these games will have to be million sellers and brisk ones at that.
What does the community think?
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