| Scoobes said: 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. |
I do touch-type, actually. It's not nearly as hard as you think. I didn't get taught it, or anything, I just started doing it over time.
Anyway, as I said, the whole point of my post was to emphasise the nonsense of suggesting that sales of three specific games is somehow indicative of how the Wii sold. I demonstrated its nonsense by picking alternate games on the Wii, and then games on the 360, that show that you can reverse the argument or apply it to another console just as easily.
I can't comment on CoD3, as I never did get that game. I got WaW and BO, and I enjoyed WaW (I actually still haven't gotten around to actually playing BO - it's a game I'll play at some point, though), but I could feel the lack of features in that game. I don't blame Treyarch for that - they had their hands full just porting the main engine over, considering that it was IW that made the original engine. Anyway, you said CoD3 was why people weren't playing CoD on Wii... but I doubt that, since WaW sold nearly as well as CoD3 did.
And the FPS genre didn't gain traction because third parties couldn't be bothered trying to make a quality Wii online experience, and online was where FPS was flourishing. Treyarch did put the effort in, at least, and they saw reasonable sales, but like I said, CoD was already lost for the Wii after MW failed to turn up in 2007.
Also noteworthy was that there was no top-notch FPS, nothing to drive interest in the genre in the way that Modern Warfare did on the PS3 and 360. The CoD games were lacking functionality, MoH:H2 wasn't exactly highly-rated (metacritic rating of 73), Red Steel was a buggy mess (although it showed potential - I honestly think that a 2008 Red Steel 2 that expanded on the first game and fixed the problems rather than being a completely different experience would have done incredibly well), and The Conduit was simply lacking on all fronts. In short, nothing showed that the genre could reach its potential because developers didn't really provide a game that had the potential to do so.
More importantly, there was no standout exclusive FPS. As you pointed out, 360 had games like Halo, PS3 had games like Resistance. You could say "well, it was Nintendo's job to provide that game", but third parties routinely argue that you can't compete against Nintendo in their genres. If Nintendo had released an FPS that sold 20 million copies, third parties would go "well, how are we supposed to compete with that?" and put all their games on the 360 and PS3.
As for Monster Hunter, there are a few things worth noting. MHTri on Wii outsold all other MH games in North America, and all bar one in Europe. In Japan, yes, it's been more of a "trend", but I wouldn't exactly call the trend an ordinary pattern. And the PS3 version of Portable 3rd didn't exactly light up the charts in Japan. But I don't think it's worth really arguing over it - it's kind of a side point at best. The point to make is that MH clearly sold very well on the Wii, which demonstrates the absurdity of using games like NMH to argue that the Wii doesn't support those sorts of games.
