Wow I'm surprised. A very well written article that was generally fair on all fronts. Instead of putting personal opinions in on the matter, he analyzed the data and drew a conclusion from it. Then any opinions he might have had still recognized that the data existed. I must say it is unusual nowadays to read an article from someone in the gaming media on sales and see it so well done haha.
Now I'm not completley in agreement. I do think that sequels are a strong market and one that people can still profit on the Wii and other systems. Only thing is, developers have to stop seeing sequels selling purely off brand alone. That they'll see the "2" behind it and think well I liked the first one so obviously they'll pay more for the second one.
To see success in a sequel you need to do a few things. First, make a game that vastly improves upon the second one... no one wants to buy the same thing over again... especially if maybe they didn't like the first one all that much. Or if it is going to be something that is eerily similar or expansion then give it a budget price (aka Wii Fit Plus at $20 but actually most sales came of the bundled one but that's different). Second, you have to market it vastly... even more so than the first. The people know the brand exists, market it so they know to pick it up. Just like hardcore gamers, there'll be some who will know it exists, but most need to see a commercial or advert. Finally, just make sure that you are advertising the selling points of the game. Once again, brand alone doesn't sell sequels... knowing that they are getting a full experience with loads of new content sells sequels.
Other than that I think the best quote was this:
"But Divnich makes a compelling point: If software makers are not following the Nintendo-style model, they have very little room to complain that they’re not seeing Nintendo-style results."
That's absolutely perfect. We always question why 3rd parties can't get Nintendo like sales, but do they have Nintendo like quality and Nintendo like marketing. I mean you can't just say you want to be something and that be enough. If you want to see Nintendo like success, you need to show Nintendo like initiative. I've seen very very very few publishers do this on any Nintendo platform since the SNES. That's a long time ago. And minimal on the Wii bar a few I won't start to name. They won't achieve 20 million sellers, but they could definitely tap into that userbase much more than they are doing now if they gave the effort that Nintendo does with every last one of their big projects.
