Ok so I must ask, WTF is up with Others ?

[Millennium]

Despite the overinflated expectations of developers (which they have successfully projected onto their core markets), many Wii games actually sell quite well: enough to make a profit, even. It's amazing just how few games one needs in order to do that, when you keep your development costs under control.

But the developers frankly don't market to the Wii audience. They don't want to, because you can't market to them the same way you market to the veteran gamers who have been conditioned by marketers to respond to specific, easy-to-develop things (i.e. graphics). To market to the blue ocean, you have to do two things, neither of which third parties seem willing to do. Companies that do these two things, like Nintendo, succeed. Others fail.

The first thing you have to do is to go to where the blue ocean is. They are not, as a rule, in the places where longtime gamers gather. They don't read gaming magazines, and they don't go to gaming forums. Why not? Because frankly, we creep them out; they've wanted to play for a long time, but they haven't wanted to play with us. Whether that's right or wrong is outside the scope of this thread; the end consequence is that you have to go to more traditional advertising venues: television (when's the last time you saw a third-party Wii game with a TV commercial?), newspapers, billboards, and the like. Nintendo doesn't go through all of these, but it goes through enough to make a difference. You can also see this in Nintendo's own sales: those that are marketed through "traditional" venues tend to do better than those marketed only in places where longtime gamers gather.

The second thing that you have to do is to advertise in ways that impress them. Marketers have had a long time to condition longtime gamers into believing that graphics make a difference, and that deep stories can take a game that just isn't fun and make it much better. But the blue ocean isn't impressed by these things. Instead, you have to convince them that the game is fun: specifically, that the act of playing the game is fun. This is why Nintendo's commercials flash back and forth between the game and the players: to convince someone that something is fun, you show people having fun with it. Third parties generally don't do this, and the few exceptions to this rule -for example, the Mario&Sonic games- have sold very well indeed. But it means adopting gameplay models that are fun -mashing buttons is, as a rule, not much fun- and this takes more work than third parties are willing to put into a console that won't let them make pretty pictures. This dooms them from the start: most longtime gamers swore off Nintendo long before the Wii came around, so you won't impress them with anything you do, but because you're not doing the one and only thing new gamers really want, you won't impress them either.

Is it any wonder, then, that third parties barely make any profit on many of their Wii games? They set themselves up to fail from the very beginning of the design phase. There are enough longtime gamers still on the Wii that they do manage some profit, but until they are willing to engage the blue ocean by focusing on quality over flash, they will never do any more than that. And it really is that simple. Look at Wii game sales: you see a lot of blockbusters and a lot of barely-profitable games (and utter flops), but you don't see very much in between. It's a simple question: do you engage the blue ocean, or don't you? If you don't, then you deserve what you get.