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HappySqurriel on 08 July 2008
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Kurakasa said:

Well that is quite stupid. :D Of course they buy mario games since mario is there. Maybe I was not clear enough with my last post.

"The fact of the matter is the vast majority of people know practically nothing about the industry, and it is unlikely that people are (on a large scale) looking for who published a game before they buy it."

which i replied:

" Vast majority of people who buys nintendo-games are familiar with the franchises, so they do know who published a game. ;)"

So you are really saying that the people do not know that mario is nintendo ip? Or what?

And yes, those titles do well on wii. Take a look at the GC sales, those titles (Sonic&RE, not mysims) did well on GC too. Apart from those few cherry picked examples, what established IP has done well on gc OR wii? Madden,COD,MGS,Fifa,PES,NFS,MOH? :)

The point is that there are really only few 3rd party IP:s that would sell to wii demographics. And those few sell most on nintendo-platforms anyway. So the advertising would not really help on that, but of course you are free to believe otherwise.

 

Anyway, this is now really offtopic so I am exiting this thread. Feel free to send me a PM (if possible) or write to my wall if you have something else to add.

 

Even though you're not here, I just have to point out that it is not about demographics ... How well most third party games sell depends on:

  1. How good of a game it is. This is the most important factor, and yet the same people who argue that the Wii has the worst software line-up (and that all third-party Wii games are crap) ignore this when they talk about software sales on the Wii. Not all good games sell well (Okami, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Ico and Shadow of the Collossus) but few games sell more than 1 million units without being enjoyable.
  2. How well known and "High Quality" the brand is. Pretty much everyone agrees that how well known a game licence is directly relates to how well a game sells; certainly, there are exceptions, but most game series see moderate sales on their first release and the second or third title is the break-out success.
  3. How popular the genre is. Few puzzle games (like Boom Blox) or point and click adventure games (like Zack and Wiki) have sold more than 250,000 copies in the past decade while (at the same time) most FPS or racing games can pass that mark with very minimal marketing.
  4. How well a game is advertized. After a game is completed there is only so much you can do to really sell it, but people are not going to go out to buy a game they have never heard of.

 

The demographic of the system doesn't really factor in mainly because the demographics are far more broad than most fanboys would assume. Right now with the Wii there are (probably) 5 Million (or more) die-hard Nintendo fans who are over 21, and at least another 5 Million core gamers who buy most popular systems, who would buy a high quality third party game if it was released and they knew about it. if a high quality game is released for the Wii and marketed heavily like Bioshock, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto 4, or Metal Gear Solid 4 these games would see sales that were in a similar range to what their HD console equilivalents are.