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Soundwave on 24 February 2015
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

They only published 5 new games in 2009. 

Nintendo never has been a company that releases a new game every month, and not having to release huge games towards the second half of a console cycle is just normal. 

Microsoft didn't release anything huge in 2010/2011 either outside of Halo 4 and Kinect Sports, yet they trounced Nintendo after the release Kinect. 

I don't dislike the Wii, I don't think it's god's gift to gaming either, I think it was a nice play for Nintendo that worked out for a few years, but things change. 

You're also ignoring that there were several third party hits for the Wii during this period. Like on one hand you can say well things like Metroid Prime and Punch-Out! type releases didn't matter to the Wii, well ok, so what difference does it make that Nintendo slowed down publishing those types of games? The Wii had games like Just Dance, which is probably the third biggest casual breakout hit on the platform (after Wii Sports and Fit) come in 2010, uDraw around that time too and there were lots of other casual games still coming for the platform.

Yet we see the Wii get beaten soundly by MS and Sony virtually every month after the Kinect and Move are released. It don't think that's entirely a coincidence.

I count seven for 2009, but three of them sold more than 10m copies within a few months. Not the best year in terms of quantity, but in terms of impact it didn't disappoint.

If you want to bring in third party games, you have to do the same for the earlier years. Same story as with first party releases, they were more numerous and more impactful in the earlier years. From 2011 onwards the Wii didn't get much content anymore; however, the 360 and PS3 did. The coincidence is that Kinect and Move were released in 2010, but these devices (definitely not Move) didn't cause the shift in sales momentum. It's the overall number of software releases that became more lopsided in the HD twins' favor as time went on. Since Nintendo gave up on the Wii, Microsoft and Sony would have overtaken Nintendo in monthly sales without Kinect and Move as well. So yeah, lack of content did the Wii in.


Seems like an awfully large coincidence to me. Wii was still outselling the 360 in the first half of 2010, in the second half of 2010 is where the 360 starts to overtake them. 

From a casual players POV is not's like Nintendo had some secret magic formula, you can play (effectively) Wii Sports on any system. It's just called Kinect Sports on one, Sports Champions on the other. Casuals really don't have huge hang ups about this stuff, if its relatively fun and easy to get into, they'll get into it. One has Wii Fit, the other has Kinect Fitness or whatever, they all have EA Active. They all have Zumba Fitness, Just Dance, XBox has Dance Central, etc. etc.

It's pretty easy to see from the POV of a casual shopper what happened here. Beyond that with Kinect, the 360 really was a much more balanced overall machine that everyone in the family could enjoy legitimately from the 16-year-old teenager who likes COD to having something to play when grandma/uncle Johnny/Aunt Mavis whatever came over on weekends. 

You didn't need to buy two seperate consoles when one console could suddenly provide a wider spectrum of content that makes everyone in the household happy. 

I think Nintendo actually was lucky that MS had to spend an extra year really fine tuning the Kinect technology, if it (and Move) had come out a year earlier, Wii sales would've started to decline from then on too. They were very lucky to get basically 4 year window of no competetion, the moment they had direct competetion is predictably where things go sour for them. 

It doesn't really matter at this point though because something was coming that would be bigger than the whole Wii/Kinect movement in getting non-gamers/fringe players playing and that was iOS/Google gaming ... which is far bigger than Wii or Kinect could ever have dreamed of being. 

Today far more casuals are playing games on a regular daily basis than the Wii could ever have dreamed of. 150 million people today for example play Candy Crush alone on a *daily basis*. Wii Sports? Yesterdays news and comparitively small potatoes.