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Sal.Paradise on 08 April 2012
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RolStoppable said:
Sal.Paradise said:

Ah, that's a little worrying..

Anyhow, I'd like to defend kowenicki's statement by saying that while, as you mentioned, you could get million seller shooters on the Wii and that is a great result for a company financially, the market for the HD twins + PC was just so much larger that, relative to them, the Wii couldn't compete in that genre. 

Now, assuming the rest of the vgchartz numbers are fine, as I haven't got much experience here, I'm looking at the top 20 shooters for the Wii and I see that the sales range from 0.38m to 2.14m (ignoring Link's Crossbow Training because it was bundled), and looking at just the 360 numbers, nevermind PS3 sales or PC sales, I see 2.33m - 13.88m.  That's just 360, nevermind the extra millions that the multiplatform games sell on PS3 and PC, or the handful of exclusives for each that also pull those numbers.

If you were/are a fairly major publisher or developer, it's just a no-brainer that your 'core' games (or at least TPS/FPS) should be developed for the HD twins this generation. There never was a market for these games on the Wii that could rival the HD twins + PC, or even just the 360/PS3 alone.

I've read this argument countless times before. The thing is, the Wii doesn't have to beat any other system to be financially viable for a genre. If the Wii is financially viable in and of itself, that's all that matters in the end.

If you are a fairly major publisher, it should be a no-brainer that a Wii game based on an established IP selling to an established market is a much safer bet financially than developing a new or unproven IP that may or may not flop. For example, instead of pumping money into Dark Void, Capcom could have produced a Resident Evil title for the Wii that played similar to Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition.

But, if you're a fairly major publisher, whether you're developing a new IP or an old one, why put it on the system where the sales of every single shooter game indicate it is a smaller market?

It really is that simple.

You have two options; go for the market that can get your game potentially half a million to 2 million tops if you are lucky, or develop a game that can sell on 3 seperate platforms and where you're almost guaranteed to sell more, even in cases on only 1 of those 3 platforms?

There are so many middling or straight up poor shooters that have been forgotten about since their release on the PS360/PC, yet they have sales in the hundreds of thousands that only the top 13/14 Wii shooters could touch. 

I don't think there are any proper figures that show developing shooters for the Wii is safer or potentially more rewarding for a developer than developing for the PS360/PC.