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Soundwave on 24 August 2016
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KungKras said:
potato_hamster said:


Memory of a gold fish? Nah.  There were over 1700 Wii games released. Most of them were third party. You can mention 3 third party games that did better on the wii than other platforms, and one of them was an exclusive, on a platform that sold better than the PS3 and X360.

You mentioned Call of Duty 3 - and sure it sold pretty well on the Wii. How did the sequel (World at War) do though? Not so great. How about its sequel, Modern Warfare 2? terrible in comparison to the PS3 and X360 copies. It's as if a couple million Nintendo fans decided to try out Call of Duty for the Novelty of it and decided they didn't really like it and lost intertest in subsequent years. And if Call of Duty, in its prime, on the biggest install base is getting absolutely shredded in comparison to PS3 and X360 sales, what game series actually can make it?

I actually made games that came out on the Wii. Lots of people put a lot of effort, and not so small budgets into Wii games (at least early on). Most of those games lost money or barely broke even. The only third party games that sold much of anything were Just Dance, and Sonic games. look at the effort that went into a title like Trauma Team. It sold less than 200K copies, and undoubtedly lost millions. Look at EA's sports games, like FIFA. Most of those games sold millions every year, but not on the Wii. Even with its giant install base, FIFA 09 sold less than a million copies world wide, when its PSP, PS2, PS3 and X360 versions all sold far more copies. Do you really think EA was putting more effort into the PSP version than the Wii version?

The Wii repeatedly showed that significant efforts for AAA third party Wii games were more than likely a total waste of time and money. It's ridiculous to state otherwise just because there's a handful of outliers.

Can you yourself mention more than a few games that lost money that weren't shovelware? And can you explain why the HD twins were any better?

Because during that time, publishers were going bankrupt left and right because they bet the farm on HD gaming and couldn't recoup the investment. Yet they persisted on those platforms, and left Wii in the dirt.No publisher at the time blamed failed Wii games for their bankrupcy, It was always rising development costs (HD gaming) and lower sales. Can't have been Wii since it was as inexpensive as the previous gen to develop for.

The Wii market got poisoned early on by some third party efforts. The library became shovelware galore, picking out good games became seriously hard.

Let's go back to Call of Duty 3 because it's a perfect example of how the well got poisoned in the early Wii years. It outsold the PS3 version handily even with gimped multiplayer. Then immediately after, Infinity Ward refused to make their CoD games for Wii, so the audience migrated to the HD twins. And now you're here blaming the Nintendo audience again.

If I had had the same CoD games on the Wii, and no features missing, I would have made the WIi my primary platform for that series, despite the graphics.

Also if third parties made so many great efforts, why were there gaping holes in the platform library? I mean it took until the end of its life to get a good split screen multiplayer FPS on it (Goldeneye). Something I was dying to play on the Wii since the very beginning. And it did pretty damn well when it came out, enough to warrant a multiplat sequel. Imagine if it got made when the Wii momentum was in full swing. There was literally no competition for years on end for a game like that. You'd think that if third parties were flocking to the platform with sincere efforts, we'd have had one at year 2 into Wii's lifecycle, at least.

The Call of Duty audience was never staying on Wii. The system simply couldn't run the "real" COD engine, gamers are not stupid, outselling the PS3 version for a year is kind of an overrated metric because the PS3 was selling worse than the GameCube its first year due to a $600 price point. 

The other COD games on the Wii did have some decent effort put into them, for example Black Ops and World At War were better reviewed games than COD3, the hardware simply wouldn't allow Activision to give Wii owners the proper COD experience -- and that's 100% Nintendo's fault. 

If the $200 GameCube could be a full generational leap over the N64, there was no excuse for the $250 Wii to be that weak. It should have been at minimum 2/3rds of an XBox 360. In which case Nintendo would've gotten pretty much every third party game on the PS3/360. The Wiimote was a $10 piece of plastic at most, there's no way the hardware cost all went there.