Why are third party games selling well on Switch?

[Jumpin]

Soundwave said:

Jumpin said:

This is an example of selective memory. The N64 was NOT very successful for third-party software. The Wii, on the other hand, was Nintendo's most successful console for third-party sales.

The N64 had 53 total million sellers.
The Wii had 160 total million sellers.

Of those 53, 38 of them were published by Nintendo. The Wii had 40 Nintendo published games sell over 1 million.
The N64 had 15 total million sellers that were third party published.
The Wii had 120 total million sellers that were third party published.

To go deeper into total sales:

The N64 sold a total of 225 million games shipped, 133 million were published by Nintendo, leaving a total of  92 million third party.
The Wii had a total of 965 million games shipped, 405 million were published by Nintendo, leaving a total of 560 million third party.

To break it down into percentages: 58% of Wii games sold were third-party.  40% of N64 games were third-party.

The total number of third-party games that sold on Wii is roughly 2.5X higher than the TOTAL number of games sold on N64, over 6 times higher than the total number third party games sold, and a total penetration rate of about double for third party games on the Wii than those compared to the N64.

To compare other million-selling third-party games:
Gameboy has 11
SNES had 29
NES had 34
GBA had 42
3DS has 19 (But 45 first party)
DS had 83 (and a whopping 59 first party)

Whether people like it or not, the Wii was the King of third-party sales when it comes to Nintendo's consoles. DS is the second most successful by quite a distance.

Honestly think that 160 million sellers is overblown, if its VGChartz data that is overblown big time. From sources like third parties themselves, the number would appear to be closer to 30 million third party million sellers to go with 36-37 or so from Nintendo. And most of those third party titles were things like Just Dance, Carnival Games, EA Active, etc. ... stuff that's not a sustainble style of gaming IP that relied on fad trends. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games

https://www.ranker.com/list/the-best-selling-wii-games/r20x

Monster Hunter Tri, Resident Evil 4, Red Steel 1 (not 2), Sonic, Epic Mickey, 1 year of the Call of Duty series appear to be among the few major Wii 3rd party games that topped a million that weren't in that dance/fitness/party/puzzle game category. IMO Switch will beat this by the end of its life cycle, probably fairly easily. 

VGChartz doesn't get data from developers, they estimate/guesstimate most of the data on their site, no offence to them, and then fill in the blanks with whatever official data they get here and there. 

The difference with the N64 is you see titles like NFL Hitz, NFL Quarterback Club, NWO/WCW Nitro, Star Wars: Episode I Racer, South Park 64, Turok 1 and 2, hit a million ... that's pretty impressive considering how expensive the games were how the system only had a userbase of 33 million (mostly because Nintendo cut the legs off the poor machine by insisting on cartridge only). 

Whether you approve of the genre or not is irrelevant, they're still sales. Rock Band may not be to your tastes, but it still holds a 92%, higher than any of the N64 games you listed. The South Park game you're impressed by reviewed lower than just about every Just Dance game and spinoff.

On sources - VGchartz is a better source than your wikipedia article. VGchartz tracks sales, and (while not perfect) it aligns fairly closely to other sales trackers such as NPD and Famitsu. VGchartz also tracks years worth of data while your wikipedia article only tracks data from IGN and press releases. Wikipedia ends up with an incomplete list as a result; for example, your Wikipedia article claims Rock Band on Wii only sold 1 million, but it also cites a source from 3.5 months after release from an IGN article discussing how the Wii version sold much better than Xbox 360 and PS3 - official combined sales by the end of 2008 were 4 million units. vgchartz tracked it for several more years ending up at 2.08 million;  VGChartz is grossly inaccurate. Another example is Lego Starwars, the 4 games sold a combined 30 million units by 2012, not even 1 million of those was on Wii? For the record, VGchartz has it at 5.66 million on Wii, are they really so far off the mark?

After years of tracking, the game totals of first and third party titles tracked by vgchartz ended up 5 million below Nintendo's numbers; and their numbers track about identically with Nintendo's numbers on first-party software. This means, that in order for them to be wrong on third-party sales, an incredible coincidence would have had to occur... it would also mean that the Wii has a ludicrously high average sales of games that didn't sell over 1 million -- since the Wikipedia article you linked claims that only 419 million of the sales comes from games that sold over 1 million, that leaves over half a billion more across about 1400 other games. According to the Wikipedia sales page for N64, only 91 million sales are unaccounted for when tallying up the million sellers; if VG Chartz is wrong, then that indicates that the Wii had a much smaller number of flops than the N64 did, despite having a monstrously huge library compared to the N64 (another way to look at it: the N64 had about 10 games released per million consoles sold, the Wii had 15). Since the quality of N64 games was supposedly higher, why such a high degree of failure when compared to the Wii, despite the fact that competition on the Wii was 50% higher? Why would there be such a low degree of failure on the Wii? It doesn't add up or make logical sense.

 

The more likely and logical answer is that vgchartz is close to accurate in their sales estimates and that Wii does, in fact, have many times more third party million sellers than the N64.

Independent of million sellers, thanks to official numbers from Nintendo, we still know that on a per capita basis Wii owners bought double the number of third-party games compared to N64 owners.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 12 August 2018