How well do the Conduit and Madworld have to do to send a message?

[phisheep]

Interesting question, OP. Here’s a thoughtful answer …

There are two things that publishers will be interested in here:

First, what audience there currently is on the Wii for these types of game. That is a bit of an unknown given the mass-market ‘casual’ label the Wii attracts. You’ll get a picture of that from the first-month sales profile, as most of the target audience will be early adopters accustomed to front-loaded games.

Second, is whether additional gamers can be attracted to the Wii. And that includes all the ‘gathering dust’ crowd and all the ‘I sold my Wii’ crowd and all the ‘Wii is for kiddies’ crowd. Lots of them won’t have a Wii yet (or if they have one they are keeping quiet about it because it will harm their image!). Here, critical reception both by journos and on forums is important, and we’d be looking for short-term legs over the first three months or so of sales.

Nobody really thinks that the stereotypical Wii gamer is going to pick these up, but nobody really knows just how stereotypical we all are.

As to frontloading of sales, particularly shooter sales, that is really about competition between developers on a particular platform and the effect may not be so pronounced (at least yet) on the Wii because there is that much less competition in these genres.

As to these two games in particular …

Madworld looks a bit like a sheep in wolves clothing – a casual-ish game in gory attire. I’d expect it to be picked up by a particular demographic (trad gamer profile, 14-25 male) but for sales to be impacted by two other considerations. First, in this demographic most Wiis are in the living room as family machines while most other platforms aren’t – there maybe a reluctance to have graphic gore in that public a place. Second, gore is not universally appealing – probably US+UK sales is a better indicator than worldwide. I would expect Madworld to have a short, low spike and to pick up slowly as the target audience buy Wiis.

Conduit is more mainstream, more acceptable in the living-room. Again US+UK (and perhaps mainland Europe) are the markets to watch, but I would expect a higher spike than Madworld and maybe a surge at 2-3 months depending on critical reaction (as not too many will be jumping at it at launch).

As to expected sales, I would look for Conduit to sell 1m in three months and another million over the following nine. Madworld is just too odd to tell.