MWR: the core market didnt shift

[Kenny]

Reasonable said:
I think the consoles have very different demographics and that's that. A CoD title on Wii can be profitable, no doubt about it, but the market for it is a fraction of that on PS3/360. The ratio between Wii owners wanting a CoD game and PS3/360 owners wanting a CoD game is huge.

On the flip side, look at the demand on the Wii for titles like Wii Sports, Mario, etc. and compare that to say Banjo on 360 or Ratchet and Clank on PS3.

The bottom line is that if you really had to chose where to invest, for a title like CoD it wouldn't be the Wii. This doesn't make the Wii doomed, but it does explain certain opinions and views of developers and analysts.

In reality, if it's profitable to add another 1.5 M units of a franchise on Wii to sales of over 10M on PS3/360 then hopefully developers will say why not and make such games available to those who would clearly like to receive them, but in terms of general analysis the much smaller Wii sales are going to be judged somewhat harshly (arguably incorrectly as this simplifies the demographic position).

As far as CoD games go, you also have to remember that the Wii version was never on equal footing with the PS360 versions, so it's hard to draw a direct comparison.

 

Call of Duty 3: The Wii version was based off the PS2 version and didn't have online multiplayer, period.  If memory serves (and according to vgchartz), the Wii version actually outsold the PS3 version by a fair margin, but nobody seems to remember or care.

Call of Duty: World at War: The Wii version's multiplayer was heavily gimped compared to the PS360 versions (drastically lower multiplayer limit, no vehicles, fewer gameplay modes, no Nazi Zombies, etc).  And it still sold more than a million.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Although this one turned out to be a reasonably faithful analogue of the PS360 versions (albeit with lower multiplayer limit), the Wii version was released two years behind the PS360 versions, with absolutely no advertising support.  It also had to compete against its own successor being released on the PS360 at the same time, which received absurd amounts of advertising support.

 

In fact, looking at what was done with the Wii version of CoD games, it's not that much of a stretch to say that Activision's been actively sabotaging their own efforts.