My own thoughts on how to score with the Wii audience.

[Veder Juda]

LordTheNightKnight said:

...

Don't make games that are part of hit series in name only.

It's rude, but either you are an idiot or deliberately sabotaging your support of the Wii (perhaps a little bit of both) if you put out a game unlike the kind of game(s) that made a series a hit, and slap that series name on that unlike game while throwing it out on the Wii as a "test".

Imagine making a sci-fi film and calling it Die Hard. Even if you cast Bruce Willis, suddenly setting the film in the next century or so, and taking out most of the action, would seem like a moronic move.

But somehow making a hack & slash game and calling it Soul Calibur, or a slow-paced rail shooter (hint, rail shooters are arcade games and need to be fast-paced) and calling it Dead Space, or a fighting game with unpolished gameplay and calling it Castlevnania*, are somehow seen as proper ways of putting series on the Wii.

* I'll give that one just a little, since Iga said it was more about a format where the Wiimote wouldn't tire one out from all the whip motions, which ironically would have made perfect sense for the swordfighting in Soul Calibur.

Now I do need to make it clear I don't mean established spin-offs. Those are selling well. Even the Resident Evil Chronicles games are based off of the shooter spinoffs on the Playstation 1 and 2.

I mean selling a game that is not like the actual series, and it comes out of nowhere, and acting as though it is part of the series. Okay, Dead Space only had one game before it, but still it wasn't enticing to the Wii audience to see an RE4 style game get turned into a "guided first-person experience".

But Soul Calibur Legends pisses me off the most. They couldn't just port III over to the Wii? They had to try a cheap imitation of Dynasty Warriors? Again, if that was meant to be a spin-off, I could have lived with that. But it's basically all the Wii has gotten of that series, while IV was f****ing ported to the PSP (not that the PSP got the game, but that the Wii isn't getting it as well).

BTW, some might mention Dead Rising CTYD. Now I like that game, but I admit it doesn't have wide appeal (which it seems some fans of Madworld cannot comprehend about that game), but at least Capcom didn't call this game a test. It was just to correct some of the complaints of the original game.

Also, even though it's a DS game, Chinatown Wars was not the kind of GTA game that sells big numbers. Last I checked, the top-down games sell a few million at best, and this one didn't even have the art style of those games. The DS audience had nothing to do with it. Same with the arguments about Wii games.

...

I totally agree on this one--I agree with the whole lot of it, but this in particular.  It seems like such a stupid plan, to put the "real" games on the HD consoles while making spin-offs for the Wii, wouldn't the people who want the spin-offs the most be the same people who flock to the real games?  Putting the real games on the HD consoles lures the fans to those systems, and the spin-offs are left to die, forced to compete against the very games that create the audience that the spin-offs are supposed to tap into; Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles' biggest competition isn't NSMBWii, WiiFit Plus, or even Silent Hill Shattered Memories, it's Resident Evil 5.

It seems like game developers just expected everyone to buy both: an HD console for serious gaming, and a Wii for all the weird quirky stuff that just wouldn't work on the HD consoles.  Instead of trying to please everyone, they pidgeonhole the consoles.  Personally, I have a Wii and PS3, but I almost never play the later, so I consider myself a Wii owner; when Capcom released Street Fighter IV, I knew I wanted it, but I also knew I wouldn't be playing it too much, so I bought it used at less than half-price (most of the time I just ignore what's on the PS3); if it was on the Wii, I'd be playing it all the time, and would have bought it new, at full price.  Tatsunoko vs. Capcom?  Imported it from Japan, and am buying it when it comes out in America.  Technically, the one coming out this month is more of a "Super" Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and not quite the same game, with new characters and all.

On a side note, I feel the exact same way about Soul Calibur as you.  I loved Soul Calibur II, and was angry when Namco made SCIII a PS2 exclusive, which made less sense considering how well the GameCube version sold.  Then we get Soul Calibur Legends, a cheap hack and slash game, which as far as I can surmise, was made using the money Namco set aside to port Soul Calibur IV to the "Revolution", which Namco thought would be HD as well.  Then, they go through the trouble of creating a version of SC for the PSP, and they couldn't even be bothered to create a Wii version of that.  Of all the fighting games, Soul Calibur seems like it would be the perfect fit for the Wii; the two main attacks are horizontal and vertical strike, and it's blatently obvious how that would work.

A lot of third parties are left scratching their heads over New Super Mario Bros. Wii, either unable to understand how this "lazy" game is selling, or too scared of the competition to realize what a great lesson can be learned from it.  Mario used to be massive, SMB3 and SMW each sold around 20 million, but Mario 64 dropped to the low teens, and Sunshine and Galaxy failed to crack 10M.  Nintendo spent the last decade trying to fix 3D Mario, while gamers simply didn't like 3D Mario, they wanted 2D Mario; Nintendo was following preconceived notions that 3D was better, or at least as good as 2D, and that 3D Mario had to be better than 2D Mario.  When Nintendo finally made a new 2D Mario, sales shot through the roof and NSMB on the DS also sold 20M, leading to NSMBWii.

There are two morals to this story: if you follow preconceived notions, as opposed to giving your fans what they really want, you will fail; and if you give the fans what they want, you will be rewarded, even being forgiven for past mistakes.  Nintendo learned this the hard way; third parties can learn it the easy way by studying Nintendo, or the hard way by making the same mistake and failing, over and over.