Only bad Wii games sell badly - Bloober

[theRepublic]

Metallicube said:

Little King's Story might be the one and only Wii game where I am genuinly perplexed as to why it didn't catch on. Although I have a couple of theories, such as the strange kiddy image not meshing with the complex and difficult gameplay, and the obvious lack of advertising. I still think it should have sold more though, it was pretty accessible I thought, and one of the most fun Wii games I've played. But really, almost any Wii game that didn't sell I could probably offer a good reason as to why it didn't sell, whether it be lack of advertising, niche concept, or crappy shovelware. It's all about knowing how to market your product and make it accesible, along with creating a genuinly fun game that will please as many people as possible.

And yes, I guess people tend to gravitate towards Nintendo games, sometimes blindly without questioning them, but you have to take a step back and question why that is. There is a reason people do this, because Nintendo has earned the trust of many with their quality games. If you buy a new Zelda game from Nintendo, you pretty much know you're going to get quality. This doesn't include the CDi abominations of course, which were not made by Nintendo :)

In the case of 3rd party efforts on Wii, it becomes far more difficult to trust them, and rightfully so, as 90% of them turn out to be crap. I will never get why so many 3rd parties can't crack the "secret" of making a quality Wii game when Nintendo continues to do so, but hopefully one day that changes, and once it does, the sales will follow.

I've got a reason for the sales of Little King's Story.

You can't buy something if you can't find it.

Walmart only sells it online, it is not in stores.  Target's website says they will have it in 2 to 4 weeks.  I couldn't find it in a search of Best Buy's website.  It goes on and on like that.

Retailers just didn't stock this game for whatever reason.  Most likely, it was the fact that Xseed is a small time publisher.  Retailers probably didn't trust them enough to take a big order from them.

Since it was not in stores, that means there are virtually no impulse buys of this game.  Parent's looking for a game for their kids would not see this on the shelf.  Kids looking for themselves are no going to see it for themselves.  That's a shame because I think the cover has some serious shelf appeal.

Lack of marketing hurt it too.  The only people who knew about this game were core gamers, and there just are not enough of those to effectively provide enough word of mouth to really get the game going.

So combine the fact that this game is pretty much nonexistent on shelves, and no one knows about it, and you have a really bad situation.  I just don't think that many people send much time browsing for things online, and certainly not enough to find this game.  When they do want to buy something online, I think they already have a good idea of what they want, they just want to find it for as cheap as possible.