JRPGfan said:
But how many "meaty" proper full length high quality RPGs did the wii have? man it was slim pickings. I dont "feel" like the wii had that many standout titles tbh. 5 big "must have"s imo, but the 3DS has tons of games at that level. |
You crossed off sports games for being sports games. That is a monumental mistake. There is a certain type of game that comes out every single year with only slight changes and sells millions every year despite being essentially the exact same game as the year before: sports games.
Someone brought up that Nintendo tends to have lower attach rates. I would say that is because of sports games. Xbox and PS have always have much better sports games support than Nintendo has had (even genesis was the more sporty system than SNES). Your typical late teen or early twenties male video game player plays sports games. And they buy the same sports game every year or two. Look at Fifa, I can't believe how much that sells now, its almost at the Call of Duty level of millions of people buying the same damn thing every year. I didn't pay attention to video games from like 2012 until 2017 (the Switch brought me back in) and when I came back to this site I was flabbergasted by the monster that Fifa games had become.
Sports games inflate sales because huge sports fans will buy the same game every year.
So sure if you're talking about quality of a system's software in a historical context its easy to overlook sports games because who cares outside of that rare sports game that seems stands out or is memorable (for me I think of NBA Jam, NBA Live '95, NFL 2k, Virtual Tennis). I mean who now is gonna be like aww man Fifa 2008 and 2009 really blew me away? Right! But since we're talking about sales, sports games drive lots of repeat software sales every single year and they bring a whole demographic of gamers to a system simply by having the same sports game come out on a yearly basis on a system.
Nintendo's big games are franchises that for the most part come out once a generation. But they have had shoddy sports games support for most of their history now and therefore have missed out on probably like 20 million people in the world who will buy the same 2-3 sports games every couple of years. Your typical American sports gamer is probably gonna buy a couple Fifas, a couple NBAs, a couple NFLs games and maybe pick up one MLB game and one NHL game. And for europeans they'll probably buy the same Fifa game every year or two. And that in a single genre of games! The only game outside of sports that has found a yearly audience of just rinse and repeat for repeat sales is Call of Duty. Some games like Guitar Hero tried that and the market eventually dried up as it got over saturated, sports games will never become over saturated because sports fans care about having the current rosters.
If Switch can get all the major sports games (and good version of them) that could potentially bring in a lot of sports gamers who are like hell yeah I wanna be able to play Madden or Fifa on the go.
Last edited by Slownenberg - on 07 April 2018
