Me (after watching the bonus round):
Hi there,
Are you in the mood for a small, data driven rant?
I really wish you would present a fuller look at Wii-third party data when you are on the Bonus Round, as not everyone is going to bother to do the research to see if what you and the others say is true or not. For instance at Nintendo's September 2009 earnings briefing, Iwata said 43 Wii games from third parties had shipped over a million units worldwide through September 2009...so it is by no means impossible to do have hit games on Wii if you aren't Nintendo. After the fourth Christmas on GC, third parties gave up because it was impossible to release profitable titles with any consistency which is a completely logical decision. You don't have that on Wii at all, the only issue is Nintendo is dominant with its catalogue above 2m units worldwide, and so only two-three third party titles per year top 2m. Nonetheless, the math implies that on average more than one third party game that has gone on to top 1m units worldwide has been released worldwide per month (43 games over 35 months) on the Wii from launch through September 2009.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/091030/img/slide/48l.jpg
It will be a lot higher through December, probably right around 70, when Nintendo's earnings data comes in later this week. My guess is you have access to full NPD, GFK, Chart-Track and Media Create data, in addition to our less-accurate but more frequently updated data. The idea that the Wii-third party market is a wasteland is way overblown - even with Nintendo's entire lineup of games there was a 250m-300m market for third party games to fight over through December 2009. If it wasn't for the Wii Sports bundles, third pary games would account for 2/3 of all Wii software purchased by retailers worldwide. It isn't even clear that Wii Sports has hurt third parties, as the game clearly drove Wii early on and roughly speaking, vendors are buying eight games for every Wii worldwide (it is closer to nine in North America).
EA has said it invests $1 on Wii game development for every $3 to $4 invested in a game for PS3/360. If that is roughly standard then so as long as the Wii third party software market remains over 25%-33% the size of PS3/360 market by units than the publishers have no reason, economically speaking, to kill support for the Wii. Personally, I don't see the HD third party market topping 275m in a single year worldwide - and so development should continue roughly as is for the remainder of the generation. I'm actually more worried about publishers like Sqaure-Enix over the next few years which have exploited the DS and PSP in Japan to ride out the complicated western console transition.
Your idea of Wii-HD has always intrigued me but most of the people I know who own a Wii simply hate the popular genres on PS3 and X360. There are after all 120 million PS2 owners who bought the system for non-GTA games. That is the audience buying Wii. Those of us old enough to buy 'M' games associate the 'M' with "Mediocrity". The best way I can say it is that as much as the traditional core audience dislikes the Wii Remote and balance board as gimmicks, the older Nintendo audience dislikes 'M' games as a different type of gimmick. So games like GTA and Call of Duty wouldn't perform well on a Wii-HD either, because the genres would still be disliked by the older audience.
Happy 2010.
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I don't think I'm being unrealistic when I say the response below is to what I wrote to Michael...
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Running through the NPD results for 2009 (U.S. only in retail dollars), it looks like Nintendo first party Wii titles sold 27.5 million units for a total of $1.53 billion at retail. In contrast, overall Wii software sales were 72.4 million units and $3.23 billion.
I think that this illustrates an obvious point: Nintendo first party titles dominate on the Wii.
Nintendo captured 38% of unit sales and 47% of dollar sales, leaving the rest for third parties. The average Nintendo first party Wii title sold for $55.63, while the average third party title sold for $37.85. Nintendo first party titles captured the top 6 positions, 9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 21.
The games I mentioned in Bonus Round (Resident Evil The Darkside Chronicles and Dead Space Extraction ) finished at positions 151 and 261, respectively.
Interestingly (at least to me), the six third party titles in the top 20 were EA Sports Active, Lego Star Wars, Madden 10, Tiger Woods 10, Deca Sports (?), Game Partyand Rock Band 2.
The Nintendo first party games in the top 21 are the usual suspects, with Mario and Sonic counted as a Nintendo title because it has the name "Mario" in the title.
Recently, we've seen comments from third parties (Capcom, EA and Ubisoft) expressing frustration over an inability to generate big sales on the Wii. Similarly, we've seen comments from Nintendo about how quality and marketing is the key to success on the Wii.
I found it fascinating that the highest ranked Guitar Hero title on the Wii in 2009 was GH World Tour at #30. I also found it fascinating that games like Just Dance, Cabela's Big Game Hunter, Deal or No Deal, The Biggest Loser and Jillian Michaels 2009 all finished ahead of the highest ranked GH game.
The conclusion I draw from this is that the Wii audience is far more casual and harder to reach than the PS3 or 360 audiences (pretty obvious), and they buy brand name software (with "Wii" or "Mario" in the title, or with a TV/product tie-in). The only titles that don't fit this are Deca Sports Game Party. The average selling price of third party titles says a lot, coming in almost $7 below the average for all Wii titles, and almost $18 below first party titles. There were a lot of units sold with the word "party" in the title at $20 or less.
I made a comment on Bonus Round that half the Wii audience is hard core and half is purely casual. That split sounds pretty agressive, and the data above suggests it's more like 25/75.
Given that NeoGAF is a hard core site, I'm curious to hear your spin. What should publishers do? and
Other Comments -
$45.16, taking out both Wii Fit/BB and Wii Fit+/BB
Nintendo first party DS software sales were 16.25 million units for $499 million. Overall DS software sales were 60.4 million units and $1.55 billion, so Nintendo had 27% of units and 32% of revenues, much lower than on the Wii. Nintendo's first party ASP was $30.72, and third party ASP was $23.68, suggesting more mass market games produced by third parties.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
