MWR: the core market didnt shift

[jarrod]

VictorG said:

Reasonable said:
I think the consoles have very different demographics and that's that.

Very few people seem to want to admit that the demographics the Wii dominates in are very different.  The people that bought a Wii for Wii Fit are not going to go out and buy the latest Call of Duty game.  Games like Just Dance really bring that point home since it scored lower and had a similar advertising budget as many of the Wii core third-party games it is stomping in sales.  People can come up with excuses and blame the quality of a game or the advertising budget or whatever but demographics is the real reason why some games sell better than others when all other things are equal.

This is true to a point, but it doesn't inherently discount other factors (like scoring, advertising, promotion, word of mouth, studio pedigree, etc).  The fact that Wii has been home to "core" 3rd party successes is proof of that, demographic uncertainty isn't an impossible obstacle. I think the problem really goes back to 2006/2007/2008, and the sorts of games Wii was getting... you have to build markets on any platform, and that's what basically the entire industry did previous on the market leader.  This generation though, so much investment was sunk into the HD twins upfront, that companies became overly cautious, slow to adjust and a lot of that vital "market building" that we should've had on Wii didn't materialize.  To make matters worse, the vast majority of "core" games fall into one or more "undesirable" categories with the targeted audience (ie: they're spinoffs, they're ports/remakes, they're niche genres, they're new IPs, etc) and get little to no additional push from the publishers.  I'm of the mind that it may largely be "too late" for Wii to become the new center for development for these sorts of games too, since the west is so entrenched in HD (sometimes to their peril) and Japan is firmly planted in DS development (an often unsung competitor to Wii imo).  It may actually be better for Nintendo to refocus 3rd party efforts on the Wii successor in a few years and make sure all the big brands are there day one instead.

I'm also curious which recent "core game" had a similar ad budget to Just Dance though, that thing has had nonstop television ads.  Possibly The Conduit, but nothing else really comes to mind (MadWorld, HotD Overkill, Silent Hill SM, Little King's Story, Muramasa, ABAHB, Rune Factory Frontier, Klonoa, Resident Evil DSC, Dead Space Extraction, MW Relfex, Spyborgs, etc, etc).