Khuutra said:
There's your problem - and your solution. Appealing to demographics as they are now is not tenable because the demographics simply aren't there. In order to make these efforts on the Wii profitable, you have to work to expand y our demographic on the hardware, which is to say you need to bring in people who would otherwise buy HD consoles and convince them that buying a Wii would get them roughly the same experience (plus Nintendo). You see where I'm going with this. The only way to get comparable numbers - and comparable money - on the Wii would be to release a deluge of these games on the Wii, completely changing the face of its library as it's understood by the hardcore. Third parties would need to appeal to new buyers, not current ones, and by sheer force of content force the many potential buyers of the Wii to go "Hot damn! I can get Mario and Assassin's Creed? Sign me up!" But yes, you see the problem: it is a catch-22. They can't take the risk of that investment. The demographic split was set in stone sometime in 2007 when it became clear that third parties had missed the Wii train, so they have essentially shut themselves out from being able to bring some of their own audiences to that console. |
Demographic issues aren't insurmountable though, Monster Hunter's proven that out and Capcom handled it very deftly (MHG lead-in, huge advertising blitz, hardware bundles, specially made controller tie-in, lucrative 1st party support for the west). I expect we'll see the same with Dragon Quest, though that's much more a mainstream/casual series already anyway.
I think at this point, the only real hope for any 'core' gamer market on Wii will be coming from Japan and Japanese game makers. The west is already too rooted in the HD cycle for the most part... it's basically a repeat of DS to some degree.
