| the_dengle said: 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. |
Just Dance is a pretty bad example.
It wasn't on the 360 before and sold 1.9m on first try with a userbase of ~20m (much less when it came out). You're forgetting that PS360 owners had to buy extra peripherals to even play these games. And still the attach ratio is comparable to the Wii.
Then the PS360 versions obviously lost more marketshare with JD4, because not only the JD franchise began to die, but also Kinect and PS Move.
And still 290k for a PS3 port of JD4 gives Ubisoft more revenue than the 210k port on WiiU. 290k on WiiU would mean that it's the 2nd best selling Ubisoft game. So if the PS3 version is underperforming (which it kinda is, but not to such low levels that it would be unprofitable), then Ubisoft games on WiiU are truly doomed.
