Aielyn said:
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. 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. |
Do you touch type or something? That's a long reply in a short time. Colour me impressed.
Anyway, I'd actually argue CoD3 did more damage to the series on Wii then not having CoD4. CoD3 on Wii was a probably the worst game I've played this gen.
Thing is, the FPS/shooter genre on Wii never really semed to gain traction in the way it did on the HD consoles. There were plenty of FPS games released on Wii (Medal of Honor, Goldeneye, Conduit, Call of Duty, Red Steel), but after the first couple of years it failed to grow or fluorish as a genre. Considering the control scheme it should have been an easy genre to sell but when you compare the best sales on Wii to those of the HD twins, there's a 10-fold difference. Nothing really showed that the genre could fulfill its full potential on Wii whilst Resistance, Halo, Call of Duty and Gears all showed it was fluorishing and had a massive potential customer base on the HD twins.
There's no point cherry picking single examples on either console or pointing out possible decisions that could have swayed the market. The best way to look at this is as a whole. For every specific example there are numerous explanations as to why a game sold as well or poorly as it did. You can argue that some developers and publishers were silly for trying to compete on the HD consoles in what was an already full market (e.g. FEAR 2/3, Homefront), but the potential customer base was also a lot higher when you look at the overall sales figures of FPS'.
And Monster Hunter has been on an upward trend on consoles. First one on PS2 did shy of 200,000, second did 650,000, Tri did 1.05 M in Japan, plus the other sales from new regions. But like I said, general trends, not specific examples are more important.
