Have any AAA 3rd party Wii games bombed?

[MaxwellGT2000]

Declan said:

Torillian said:

No I guess not, but tbh with so many requirements for something to be AAA I can't really think of any HD AAA games that have bombed either.  Maybe Rock Band 3, but that was a bomb for all consoles.

In some ways that's a key point, I think - AAA values don't guarantee success, but they tend to result in them with great regularity.  For me, far too few third parties went AAA on their Wii games - perhaps they were hoping that the large userbase would garner success regardless (as may have happened with the original Just Dance), especially as fewer copies (relative to on the HD machines) would have to be sold to cover costs.  Conversely, the higher relative costs of developing for HD consoles means that some AAA HD games probably did amount to a loss despite perhaps selling seemingly respectable numbers (Bayonetta might be such an example, but it's hard to really pinpoint such games).

It might be that there is a different perception of AAA on HD consoles to the Wii.  For example, Enslaved didn't do too well.  It's development and advertising costs were, I'm sure, far higher than the vast majority of pap that comes out on Wii, and maybe even higher than games touted as AAA on Wii (I bet Red Steel 2 cost nowhere near as much as Enslaved, though I personally wouldn't consider it AAA precisely because I never saw any TV adverts for it in the UK, though I saw many for Enslaved).  Wii owners would, I'm sure, have lapped up many of the games considered decent but not AAA on the HD machines, given the long spells without anything really good to buy.

 

Sorry, I started rambling a bit there.

Though what constitutes "AAA" on PS3 and 360 is very different I could list just so many games with a bigger budget and more ads, two examples off the top of my head Dark Void and Bionic Commando, both of which garnered heavy ads at game stores, had a rather large budget, and such they blew it when it came to sales and hurt Capcom.  

Since we're also looking at scores, Enslaved comes to mind, advertised, many sites rated it highly, the budget was larger than a lot of HD projects, didn't even reach 600k combined.  Same could be said about Lords of Shadow but it at least reached 800k combined.  Brutal Legend, has all of this, doesn't make it past the 1m mark on either console, and it was kinda obvious they were expecting more from that title though I personally love it.  Lost Planet 2 has all the makings of a "AAA" title just the scores could have been better, still it did much worse than the original.  

Unreal Tournament III would be an early gen example... you know it's just a lot of games so I'm stopping there, basically there's obviously more effort being put forth more often on PS3 and 360 by third parties and to be quite honest there hasn't been one title with the advertising budget like a lot of the holiday titles on PS3 and 360 on Wii, nothing that compares to Call of Duty, Medal of Honor (another title that didn't do as well as the company wanted), Homefront, Marvel vs Capcom 3, Portal 2, etc... it just doesn't happen, but some really good games do get a little publicity on Wii and often times they do well, like your Epic Mickey, Just Dance 2, or GoldenEye.  Not exactly how people think a game like Zack and Wiki or either No More Heores would fit "AAA" just because the game is exceptional doesn't mean it had an exceptional budget or any ads at all (which is the case for these games) and titles like TMNT Smash Up had better budgets and ads.

Also for your earlier question Medal of Honor Heroes 2 was not a Wii exclusive nor was it "AAA", it was a PSP series where the second one was ported over (obvious porting with those graphics looking the same) with extra content, showing off how FPS controls SHOULD be done, and actual competent online system, that's why it had some chatter about it, but as soon as games like World at War came out it was forgotten.