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the_dengle on 29 September 2013
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oniyide said:
the_dengle said:

Lots of companies treat Nintendo consoles like this. They neglect them for years, then expect to receive a warm reception when they suddenly show up for the party. When Assassin's Creed III was released on Wii U, it wasn't as though the whole user base had been clamoring for it since the series was created; it was more like none of them had ever even heard of it before, or at least hadn't played it and didn't know what to expect from it. It was as though the game had suddenly appeared from the void. Imagine if a game called Killer Habits 5 was suddenly released on PS3/360, made by a company you recognize as a huge producer of shovelware, and you had never heard of this series before. Are you gonna buy it? Hell no. It is the publisher's duty to market its product, to inform the customers and convince them to purchase their game. Activision can't just put Call of Duty on Wii U and expect it to sell an easy 8 million like it does on other consoles. They built up those sales on PS3/360 with years of consistent, annual, high-quality releases and tons and tons of marketing. They do nothing to market COD on Nintendo systems. COD4, the game that really made the series take off, wasn't released on Wii until 2009, two years too late. Modern Warfare 2 Skipped the console entirely.

this argument makes no sense as any self respecting gameer has heard of AC and COD, these are multi MILLION selling franchises that get rave reviews on the regular. So unless WII u owners exist in some vacuum where they never heard of AC or COD what you say doesnt make sense. Its BS really my mother knows what COD is and she doesnt play games at all. ANd you are assuming that these Wii U owners are not multiplat owners which judging by the sales of the system im willing to bet that most of them are multiplat owners and they are just choosing to buy the games on systems theyve had for years.

The only thing you can say is these companies need to build an awareness for their multiplat titles on Wii U and thats about it.

Bolded is the part of my post that accounts for your objection.

Obviously COD is a cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't mean Wii owners have played it before. And grouping Assassin's Creed with it is laughable. "Any self-respecting gamer has heard of AC..." really? Not everyone who plays video games is as well-informed as the users here on this website. Hell, the Wii U has over 3 million owners. How many of them are here on VGChartz? ...Maybe a hundred? And not even all of THEM are so well-informed as you seem to think.

I'll own up to this, I know plenty about Assassin's Creed. Never played it. Not even for a second. Why should I have? I only own Nintendo consoles. I go out of my way to play games that really grab my attention (inFamous, Puppeteer, Halo, MGR: R) at a friend's house. Assassin's Creed has never been that game. And Call of Duty? I may have played it in passing at some point. But it didn't leave a strong impression on me.

Just because a series is popular doesn't mean people who don't even have the means to play it know all about it and want to get right on that. Assassin's Creed is not on COD levels of popularity. Splinter Cell isn't even close. Tom Clancy is more likely to be recognized as an author by uninformed gamers, and there are a LOT of uninformed gamers on ALL consoles.

This effect was seen in reverse when Just Dance was released on PS3/360 for the first time in 2011. Any self-respecting gamer has heard of Just Dance, right? So naturally its sales on those two platforms should have been right up there with the Wii version in sales. But they didn't even come close. 80% of JD3 sales were from the Wii version. And it only got worse; sales declined across the board, but even so, the PS3 and 360 versions of JD declined in market share that year, while the Wii version increased and the Wii U version joined the fray -- this was in 2012, quite a while after the Wii had stopped being the juggernaut it was in 2009-2010, and just as the PS3 and 360 were coming off their best year for both hardware and software in 2011.

Now suppose someone was telling you Ubisoft was going to pull support from PS3 because Just Dance underperformed. LOL, right? But that's Wii U owners (or simply Nintendo gamers) and Assassin's Creed/Splinter Cell/Mass Effect/COD/Darksiders/etc. Suddenly they're available to us and we're supposed to just instantly care without the publishers telling us why we should.