The DS and Wii userbase will not make games hits that are not hit material.

[Millennium]

mike_intellivision said:
I think that many Wii owners are smarter than the average gamer -- if not the average bear.

After all, they tend not to buy sequel after sequel.

But the OP is right, a bad game is not going to be a hit just because the market is larger. There might be more sales, but it won't be spectacular.

Mike from Morgantown

I'm not so sure it's that they're necessarily smarter, per se. I think it's more that they haven't had the long period of conditioning by game marketers that longtime gamers have had, and so Wii owners don't tend to respond to the usual marketing gimmicks. Even today's longtime gamers had to be trained to do that, and so people who haven't been through that process aren't going to be wowed by shiny trailers and pretty pictures.

That's part of the problem third parties are having with Wii games: when they bother to market the games at all, they do it the way they'd market to longtime gamers, and the blue ocean just isn't impressed by that sort of thing. Nintendo has it right: to market to the blue ocean, you can't focus on graphics and other technical BS. All you actually have to do is convince them that the game is fun to play, but as simple as that sounds it can actually be quite difficult. Nintendo does it by showing people having fun playing the games, but for that to work you have to make playing the game -not necessarily the game itself, but <i>the act of playing it</i>- look fun. That's tough to do with all but the most well-thought-out motion control schemes, and basically impossible with "traditional" controllers.