Ubisoft to "refocus" on PS3/360 in 2010

[famousringo]

Gamerace said:

WOW... Shaun White really tanked this year.

The Wii audience is very 'fadish'. You have to grab them with something interesting but then do something completely different the next year. Yearly sequels just don't work well on Wii. People will just buy the older, cheaper title. And what was novel once, isn't a second time.

Surprised no one really used WM+ (except EA) to sell games.

You don't see Nintendo coming out with SMG2, Zelda Wii 2, Metroid Wii 2, Endless Ocean 2... oh... snap.

But seriously, it'll work fine with the Nintendo core but not the casuals. NSMBW & Mario Kart should never get a sequel this gen.

Two things about Nintendo's Wii sequels:

1. They never come out just a year after the last game.

2. They always pack in enough new content/features/gameplay changes to justify a new purchase.

I agree that NSMBWii and MKWii shouldn't get a sequel this gen, but Wii Sports and Wii Fit did get sequels, because Nintendo had enough new material to justify a new entry in these franchises.

Shaun White had only one new feature this year: Create a trick. That's it. That's the only reason to buy it over last year's. If they had skipped a year, added some more features and content, and come back in 2010 with some serious reasons to upgrade, people might have bought it.

Publishers have a strange desire to turn every franchise into an annual release like Madden, but a franchise needs very special conditions to be able to actually pull off annual releases. Attempting to do it with most games will saturate demand, cut off long-tail sales, and drive down launches. You can see how the music genre is getting smothered by too many releases.

The only successful annual release franchise outside of sports games (which only sell annually due to enthusiasm for the sports franchise, not something which will sell a snowboarding game) has been Call of Duty. Activision did it by alternating the setting of CoD and giving two different developers a two-year development cycle so that they could make enough new content to justify an annual purchase. Oh, and CoD happens to be a franchise in one of the most popular genres around today.

Time to give up on the Madden dream, publishers.