After the staggering success of Nintendogs, which sold 5M units again last year, its hard to understand why more games haven't been made for the young girl demographic which turned it into one of the biggest games ever.

Ubisoft's Imagine series is based on surveys which found interests of young girls. And now three of those games have become million sellers.

http://vgchartz.com/games/index.php?name=imagine&console=&publisher=&genre=&keyword=&order=Hits

Of course, the Babyz game has already gotten a lot of attention, as it is becoming one of the biggest third party games on DS. Lots of little boys have been making fun of the game, just like little boys have always made fun of little girls for playing with dolls instead of guns. Except now the dolls and guns are both virtual, and the little boys are in their teens and twenties.

And now Imagine: Happy Cooking (Master Chef) and Imagine: Fashion Designer have both crossed the 1M sales mark as well. No doubt these are not suitable activities for "real" games either, but nonetheless, this is now a major franchise for Ubisoft. I expect it will come to Wii and maybe PC later this year.

A lot of franchises tries to aim to little girls: 'Disney Princess', 'Bratz' or 'Barbie' for example. But these games are build around their name and brand, and usually offer poor quality titles, or randomly good but generic genre (like platformers or adventure).

Ubisoft has build its franchise around real girl game concept: baby caring, cooking, fashion for the three named above. That's where they have succeeded.
For the Wii, I think it's the next logical step. It has been a success for 'Cooking Mama' or 'MySims', there's no reason it would not work for the Imagine franchise.

I'm expecting other major developpers to get into this demography soon too. With 'Nintendogs', 'Animal Crossing', 'Cooking Mama', 'MySims', and now those three 'Imagine' titles, this starts to make quite a lot of million sellers (and money).
With more competition, some really good quality titles shall soon appear, which shall turn this market into a wealthy and durable one. And that shall further increase the 'domination' of the Wii and the DS over their competitors.

Ubisoft are on the ball. As long as games like these continue to fund games like Assassins Creed its all good.

 Couldent have saied it better ;)  Still its a bit disapointing that Imagine Babiez outsold Heavenly Sword :( :P

IMAGINE GAMES are all so profitable - small budgets yet amazing sales

I'll be sad if Imagine Babies out sells ... no never mind it's all good
The more games the better, but I'm not getting imagine babies =/

The big fear is that Ubisoft forget about everything else and just develop these games given they're getting such a return on their investment (small budget, big sales) - bye bye the high risk/high budget games such Assassins Creed 2 etc.

I'm wondering when someone is going to realize the untouched goldmine that are 30-50yr/old women - already the dominate PC gamers - albeit for flash games. A lot of these women already have Wii (often for their kids) and many, many more will after Wii Fit.

Boys games are largely tapped out - everyone is fighting for that stagnated market and it's a bloodbath. Women's games are vertually untouched. It's billions on the table for whomever reaches them first (After Nintendo).

There was an American dude in Norway on a games seminar a week ago who talked about making games for girls and how vast a market it could be (we all know that girls like to spend...), ironically; the dude was from EA sports and head of Madden production!