| Scoobes said: You do realise that your cherrypicking is just as bad as his? Call of Duty 3 is the best selling CoD game on Wii at 2.17 million. The best selling on 360 is MW3 at just shy of 15 million. Black Ops which released on both HD consoles and Wii at the sametime, doesn't paint such a pretty picture; 13.82M on 360, 11.81M on PS3 and 1.25M on Wii. Monster Hunter has been on a upward trend on consoles but regardless of that, Tri is the first that's also released in the US and EU. Goldeneye was marketed as a remake to the classic N64 game. Any Nintendo fan from back then should have been willing to buy it for nostalgia alone but 1.75 million isn't exactly huge considering both nostalgia and install base. F.E.A.R on consoles was a late port of a PC game. Metro 2033 has actually sold better than VGChartz suggests considering as of June last year it had sold over 1.5 million copies on 360 & PC (http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/05/metro-2033-sales-reach-1-5-million/). A lot of other games you mentioned were ported late from Wii to the HD consoles. Lower sales are to be expected whenever a late port is involved. |
It's not cherrypicking when you provide opposing examples to demonstrate that someone else is cherrypicking - I didn't make the claim that the games I listed prove anything, only that they counter his claim. And they do.
For the record, CoD sales after CoD3 aren't a fair comparison, since Modern Warfare didn't release on the Wii alongside the other versions. That was the game that took CoD from a 2 million seller on a platform to a 10 million seller, and all the people who wanted to play CoD had to get the PS3 and 360 versions. That established the market on those platforms in a way that the Wii would never get. And then it took four more games for feature parity to finally be achieved in terms of the Wii version. Why would fans intentionally buy WaW on the Wii rather than the others when it lacks half of the key features, when they already own a 360 or PS3 for Modern Warfare?
Simply put, CoD was sabotaged on Wii (unintentionally... or rather, without specific intent to sabotage - it just wasn't supported at all by IW).
And how has MH been on an "upward trend on consoles"? The best-selling console MH before Wii was Monster Hunter 2 on the PS2, which sold under 650,000 copies. The Wii version is over 2 million. And even if you restrict attention to Japan, MHTri is easily the best-selling console game of the set.
And nobody is going to buy Goldeneye 007 for "nostalgia" reasons, when it wasn't a direct remake, but more of an imitation. Especially when the original creator of the N64 game was Rare, and the new one was Eurocom. And 1.75 million, not a big number? Really?
My mention of FEAR was to demonstrate that you can cherrypick examples on the 360 and PS3 as well. You can justify poor sales of any game that doesn't sell as well as you might have expected - that was my entire point. No More Heroes didn't sell amazingly on the Wii... but it's Grasshopper's best-selling game by a fair margin and did quite well for such a niche title - it did better on Wii than on the other systems. MadWorld was incredibly niche, and very gory, and still managed a very respectable number of copies - in fact, it's well beyond what I would have expected. The Conduit was a game that had potential, but failed in execution.
As for Metro 2033, my first observation would be that most of the sales are probably the PC version, since VGChartz generally does fairly well tracking console sales (there are exceptions, but this doesn't feel like one of them), but PC versions are much harder to track. My second would be that multiple commenters in the joystiq article you linked to made the observation that it sold slowly early on, but was often seen on sites like Amazon for $5. (EDIT: Further confirmation: http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/metro_2033/news/metro_2033_was_very_profitable_for_thq.html - "A lot of the sales were done on PC," he added, "and a lot of the sales were also done through digital mechanisms that don't get captured by any service.")
As for the late port thing... need I point out how many instances there were of Wii getting late ports of things, and people would point to the weaker sales and go "see, that's why Wii sucks". It works both ways, and that's been my entire point.
