Wow that makes a lot of assumptions on customer buying patterns without backing it up at all by data.

Casual buyers are going to buy on name recognition only? I'm guessing they didn't do the actual proper legwork to figure out if that's so and just assume it.

There are a number of reasons a "casual" could buy a game... name recognition wouldn't be on the top of my list as guess.

It'd be a fun thing to do research on, but then again it'd be a pain in the ass tracking down enough people for the survey. That's the worst part of consumer research... finding people to take your surveys when you don't have some kind of reward to hand out.

that article is BS imho
they rate the games whether they're hardcore/core or not

i'd gladly pick wii sports over GTA imho
but thats just me

.... i just ignore shovelware for the most part
and enjoy my MKWii, SSBB, & RE:4

I was making a chart based off metacritic scores just a bit ago that dealt with this. The Wii has fewer games in the "good" category, but it has the most good exclusives out of any console (my criteria was 75% or higher, excluding downloadable games). It also has the fewest ports though, which is why the numbers for PS3 and 360 are much higher (I think it was around 70 games shared between the two). They seemed to have a lot of sports/racing games + their sequels also.

Yeah this articles a little skewed. I mean, sure Wii has a terrible shovelware to quality games ratio, but I'm pretty sure the Wii has more quality titles than the PS3 does.

I'd be interested to know what is considered a "good game" to the author, because I could say that 80% of PS2 games sucked because it didn't reach an average of 90%+ on gamerankings....

Personally, I'm not fussed about shovelware, I really couldn't care less, as long as there are quality developers out there making quality games still (judging by GTA4 thats a big yes) then I couldn't care less what other crap is brought out, and I don't see why the core market should care either.

Note: Hardcore/core does not designate quality, it designates a market. (heaps of people tend to forget that).

Nice read.

The way I see it, the Wii is essentially filtering almost all the shovelware from reaching the PS3/360 and all thanks to the cheap and easy development of wii games, which if you think about it, it's a breeding ground for shovelware.

Unfortunately, their is allot of money to be made from shovelware and this problem will become even more rampant as time goes forward, and unless their is some quality control of some sort done by Nintendo, then shovelware could potentially overshadow worth while games except for Nintendo IP's. In the end this will just lead to more shovelware, because at the end of the day their is no point spending money and time to make critically acclaimed games and have them sell like crap while they can make crap and have huge returns in profit.

Mario and Sonic got an average of 67%(which is dangerously close to poor) yet has sold 4 million copies. Don't you think the critics are little too hard on wii games? They compare Mario game's graphics to GTA and then take off loads of points. Come on, Mario wouldn't look much different in HD.

3rd parties were caught off guard by the wii's success. There will be a hailstorm of good games announced for the Wii at E3 this year. I think the Wii's Christmas line could be better than PS3 and 360 lineup put together. (Especially since 90% of the games are identical)

Article fails. The gaming media is heavily skewed to hardcore games and therefore aggregate scoring is massively flawed.

The Percentages mean nothing. Just because there are a high percentage of 'shovelware' games out there, does not mean they are all being purchased in mass (Some 'shovelware' titles are selling well, but many are not), and does not take away from the number (not percentage) of good games. Most of the Shovelware titles are not even on store shelves anymore because they simply did not sell well.

PS2 had a large number of crap titles for the same reason the Wii does, but it won it's gen. This article fails miserably.

Hilarious.  If you know anything at all about the history of video games, I'm sure you're enjoying a smile. It's too bad that Nintendo doesn't screen developers and only allow a handful of the best to create games for the Wii. After all, "quality over quantity" worked so well for the N64, right?