| alfredofroylan said: It's make more moneyz...... "We understand your concern about the lack of service on the VC as of late. Due to sales numbers being far greater recently on Wiiware than on Virtual Console, we have decided to steer in the direction of WiiWare. Also, we in America have NO plans to update the Internet Channel or the Nintendo Channel. We hope you understand”
http://gamebag.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/email-response-from-nintendo-of-america/ Really? I mean it's really more profitable to make new games than adding old games to the catalog? |
It has nothing to do with how the VC is selling/isn't selling and everything to do with the finite resources of their customers.
Since the consumer only has so many dollars to spend on games in any given month between VC, WiiWare and disc-based games, Nintendo is constricting the supply of VC titles in the hopes of driving people more towards WiiWare for a few a reasons:
1. They need to grow this side of their business to be more competitive with XBLA's original content considering that, despite having a much, much larger userbase, they generally probably don't sell nearly as many games, per capita. (One way to get more people to connect online is to have compelling content to draw them there and new content is far more likely to achieve this than classic games.)
2. To grow it as noted above, they need to attract more and better devs to the WiiWare biz and can best do so by showing them sales growth in WW releases, even if it costs them absolute sales by holding back on VC titles.
3. As several people on this thread have already demonstrated, VC sales are taking away from potential WiiWare sales since people are buying a lot more VC games than WW games so, at least for the core gamer, they are losing WW sales to VC. (Granted, this does not mean that because people aren't going to be able to buy new VC games that they'll automatically gravitate towards WiiWare but it can't hurt as now, instead of buying Earthworm Jim 2, they might buy Ant Nation instead.)
All that said, this is of course speculation on my part (I do not have any special information) but I've worked in this biz long enough to learn how to decode PR-speak and that's what this sounds like to me.
