| dib8rman said: I didn't say it's sales were bad, well I did but I gave a direct comparison, which was RRR, my point is on the Mario Party issue had nothing to do with quality but with what you brought up which was the unique elements of each of the subsequent mario parties for that platform. |
That's because every game (or any product) will have "unique" elements that effect its sales. There are dozens of trends, factors, and variables that effect sales of pretty much every product, and no one absolute formula that decide how something will sell. You can't simply assume just because the Wii's rapidly growing install base clearly benefits some sequels, that the same effect will both present and as strong on all sequels. Trauma Center: New Blood is tracking around the same as Second Opinion (or sometimes below) despite one releasing to a bigger potential audience. There's probably a long discussion of why that is, but I rather not go there right now.
I've already given you a lot of examples of things that went wrong with selling. Another one being the first Rayman was a launch title like you said. The competition in the Mini-game genre at launch was mostly comprised of either poor license games by THQ and the like or add-on modes like Monkey Ball had. Rayman was basically the only dedicated Mini-game collection that showed signs of time and effort then. A year later that had changed, there had been a lot more dedicated mini-game collections, some Nintendo's very own, and RRR2 simply didn't hold up very well against them, nor had it been a strong enough brand name to offset it's short comings.
It failed to do what it was supposed to do because the better (or simply more recognizable) party games attracted those people. It's name was known but not nearly as well Mario Party of Wario Ware. (Which isn't a new IP, the Wii version was the 5th in the series) Both of those are popular long running 1st party mini-game collection titles. Mario and Sonic: Olympics may technically be a new IP, but Mario, Sonic, and the Olympics are all extremely well known names, and the spectacle of them together likely helped to sell the game in a big way. To use such a newly (albeit well received) established brand name alone against such bigger brands and expect to ride the wave of a bigger audience with a sub-par sequel seems unrealistic.
Carnival Games is another discussion entirely. Short version they had effective marketing and title that serves a very specific niche well enough.
Like I said, there's no one thing that went wrong, it was several things.
- Wasn't as well received critically by consumers and reviewers alike
- Lacked any significant change or new additions to different itself from the first in a noticeable fashion
- As result of above marketing lacked a strong hook or gimmick to draw in new customers
- Faced much stronger competition than the its predecessor
- Stronger brand names of competition likely overpowered its presence in air time and print ads
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