I have been following these games for quite some time. I decided to  pick 3 random dates and compare them to this week to help show the anomoly that the Wii legs are. I pick late oct because it was heading into the holidays season, and I picked Late Jan because not all of the holiday ferver had worn off. It is crazy what I found. Some game never changed like Wario Ware, so were higher each time like TP, and some went up then down, but only a little bit.                                   

 There are many reasons this could be possible... But, I have been preaching for some time that this holiday season, with the indruction of SMG and the anticipation of SSBB that a migration of core gamers occurred. I believe I am right. Core games are trending as far as leg go better than Casual games in most cases. SSBB will only continue this trend. I could see games like TP and MP3 not falling for a long long time.

The other major reason for this anomoly is that the blue ocean stategy is working. Casuals are still buying their party games, but they are wanting something deep. Link seems to be benefitting the most from this. Many casuals not familiar with Zelda might have purchased a Zapper. Then they saw TP, a full  blown game with Link in it and are now giving TP a second Life. TP is actually sell much better now than it did 1 year ago. One thing to point out however that this is NOT happening in Japan. I know their economy is bad, but I really have no explanation for this. Only Brawl and Wii titles seem to sell there. These Numbers are only for NA and Others. Where there is no others data I did it just for NA.

                                            10/19/07               1/25/08                   3/22/08

Metriod Prime 3-              11,000                   15,000                   14,000

Twilight Princess-            25,000                   37,000                   45,000

RE4: Wii-                              22,000                   35,000                   31,000

GHIII-                                      N/A                        70,000                   83,000

Zack and Wiki-                 N/A                        4,700                     4,800

Sonic SR-                              14,000                  17,000                   16,000

Wario Ware-                     7,000(NA)            6000(NA)             7,000(NA)

RRR2-                                      N/A                       28,000                   28,000

Lego SW-                          N/A                       34,000                   32,000

Normal Trending (with good legs)

RE: UC-                              N/A                      30,000                   23,000(Others legs broke NA goen strong)

SPM-                                  25,000                20,000                   13,000(put it in, as an example of "normal good legs")

All I can say is that the Wii is starting to look like the DS. You can add SMG, SSBB, WiiFit, and MK as games that will be top 100 for at least! 3 years... I know there are example of games that do trend normal on the Wii(DQ Swords) but I am not cherry picking to find this many games. I also left some out, more casual stuff like MP8, EA playground and whatever. Also FE: RD seems to be holding up well for a Hardcore SRPG. It is only selling 1k less that it was in late Jan.

Its hard to pin down the cause of this, cause it didn't even really happen that much with the PS2. Maybe Wii owners are less likely to buy used copies of their games.

i'm amazed at the twilight princess numbers, and it's good metroid is still hanging in there!

To me, the reason this happens is because of so many casual gamers. Casual gamers are not intent on buying games on release day. They can afford to wait. This is why, compared to 360/ps3, Nintendo systems seem to have more legs.

sorry bout the format... it looked great before I hit post.

Wii games have longggggggggggggggggg legs.

Ha ha, nice title.

Also you could insert a table instead of using the spacebar to seperate columns.

TP is a fairly common bundle... and because demand>supply, lots of forced bundles by some retailers...

Another reason for the long legs on games, is not everyone who wants the games can get a wii.... so when they finally get a wii they get that game the wanted.... people not searching for months for a wii would more likely settle for just wii sports initially...

as long as system sales are high. The great games on the platform should stay high

Or maybe Wii owners aren't selling their games as quickly as PS360 users are (or at all). I believe this to be true, and it's because they are not in a rush to buy a new release on release week, they get them when they have time to play a new game or when they finished the last one. This is shown by consistant legs.

One reason Wii owners might hold onto games longer is because a good number of (though not all) Wii owners don't sit down for 5 hours and play, but pick up and play a game (Wii Sports/Wii Play/PES2008), a level (SMG/RE:UC), a battle(Brawl) and thus they wouldn't get a game and be done with it in 2 or 3 weeks. As for games like RE4 & LOZ:TP, well we know the wii has a good number of casual users. In my saying that, I'm not saying they don't like hardcore games. I think they are casual in they like to pick up and play a game for a short time, and continue it or play another one later. It would take this type of casual player much longer to complete these games, hence there would be less of them available used at any given time.

Add into this the supply constraint factor, and the fact that new Wii owners probably already have quite a few of the games on the list at the start of this thread on their short list, the legs just make sense. Every time a store gets Wii's, it seems like the purchaser purchaes a handful of games as well (ie: a Wii, Wii Play fora controller, and SMG).

And these legs will continue for a long time to come.