So the question that has been going around for a while now is: can 3rd parties find success on the Wii, or does Nintendo completely own the software market for the console? Well I’m here to give you a solid answer to this question. And that answer is a definite maybe.
For many, the fact that the top selling games on the Wii are all Nintendo games is a major concern. For others, the fact that many of the top sellers on the Wii are the so-called “casual games” is also a major concern. The fact that Nintendo also dominates both the casual game sales and the more hardcore game sales doesn’t really help the matter. This article is not meant to disprove these beliefs, but to show why 3rd parties can’t, and probably won’t, succeed on the Wii to the same degree that Nintendo does. I’ll follow each section with some examples and reasons with how they could compete with Nintendo for a large part of the software sales pie. Each reason is bolded, followed by an explanation of why it’s a reason, and how it can be solved.
The first main reason they simply can’t compete is a lack of established, big name IPs on the Wii. Nintendo has some of the strongest brand name around. The biggest one being Mario, with 5 first party games in the top 25 (the titles with 1+ million sales) have Mario directly in the name, with one 3rd party game that has Mario in the title, and Brawl which has Mario as a character in the game. Zelda, Metroid (to some extend), Pokémon, and Fire Emblem are some other big name IPs that Nintendo has released on the Wii. Games with an established fan base are much more likely to sell better since these fans are likely to know when this game is released, and are more likely to pick up the game if they see it on store shelves, even if they know nothing about how good the game is.
A count of the Nintendo titles that are platinum sellers, a solid 9 of the 14 titles are established IPs, with WarioWare and Big Brain Academy possibly being established titles as well. The others are the Wii-series games, WiiFit, WiiPlay, and WiiSports, which is just about an established franchise now, so I can expect the next Wii-titles to be million sellers easily (WiiMusic for example).
Looking at the other 11 3rd party million sellers on the Wii, 9 of them are established franchises (or established names), with Carnival Games and Red Steel being the only non-established games. For comparison, there is only one 3rd party PS3 game (Assassin’s Creed) that is not an established franchise that has sold more than a million, while there are at least 10 3rd party million sellers on the 360 that are not established names.
Basically, brand name sells, even with little or no advertising, because, if anything, you can count on the established fan base to push sales high enough to warrant the development costs. This is one of the reasons so many games get sequel after sequel. They are almost guaranteed money makers (assuming the first game is good enough, and the sequel is not completely bad). Need for Speed is a good example. Though the best years of the franchise are behind it, it still manages to push a few million even with almost yearly iterations.
So if more 3rd parties would put established franchises on the Wii, they would end up selling. Guitar Hero, Sonic and the Secret Rings, and Resident Evil prove this.
Another reason 3rd parties can’t compete with Nintendo’s software is the quality of the games. This goes hand in hand with established IPs. You can’t just throw a poorly made game or port onto the Wii of a well-known franchise and watch it sell, like Call of Duty 3, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and Prince of Persia. MOH:H2 might have had excellent controls, but it’s very lackluster story-mode pretty much killed it, even though it’s online is good (except a few bugs, which can really kill the fun factor). COD3 and Prince of Persia both suffered from control problems. Nintendo, on the other hand, very rarely makes poor quality software. Not everyone might agree that their games are the best in the world, but they hardly ever contain bugs (even small bugs), or poor controls, and as such they can be considered quality games.
This one’s pretty simply. Good games sell, bad games don’t. Of course, since people’s definition of “good” differs, some might believe some games should have sold better, while other games shouldn’t have sold as well. This will be examined in more detail in the next section.
And of course the way to fix this “issue” is simple: release quality games on the Wii!
Yet another reason 3rd parties can’t compete with Nintendo’s lineup is the fact they don’t advertise, advertise to the wrong audience, or narrow the games appeal so that it does not have the chance to sell on par with Nintendo’s games. Nintendo advertises. Though they hardly need to, since not only are their games some of the few good titles on the system, but they also have good name recognition (in both the names of the games, like Mario Party #, and in Nintendo as a company). Yet they still advertise their games. And their games have sold really well. One of the games I don’t remember seeing as much advertising (if any) as the other games was Metroid Prime 3. I don’t recall seeing any for it, besides the E3 trailer that was for the Wii, not MP3. I’ve seen commercials for SMG, Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, WiiFit, Zelda, Link’s Crossbow Training, just to name a few. But not Metroid Prime 3. The result? MP3 is one of the lower selling big name Nintendo games. Coincidence? You decide. Also, GH3 and Mario and Sonic at the Olympics got pretty good advertising, as far as I remember, and they’re the highest selling 3rd party games. Coincidence again? We may never know.
Boom Blox also suffers from the mis-advertisement. Instead of being advertised to all age groups, which would love the game, the game was targeted at 8-12 year olds, a very distinct minority of Wii owners, compared to the 100% of Wii-owners who would love this game, if only they knew about it. If only. And because of this, the game has seen lackluster sales. Word of mouth might save this game and get it to a million though.
No More Heroes and Zack and Wiki are two other games that have slightly narrowed their targetable audience by being niche games. Zack and Wiki belongs to a mostly dead point and click genre, while No More Heroes graphical style is a turn off to some. I personally know one person who wouldn’t buy it because he didn’t like the graphical style. As such, these games have not seen the massive success that Nintendo’s “everyone can pick up and play” games have seen, but are by no means a failure. Failure to advertise also plays a big role, causing their sales to be even lower than they could be.
The solution is another pretty easy one. Advertise your games! Correctly! And then we’d have a winner!
But the main reason 3rd parties can’t, and probably won’t, compete with Nintendo is that they simply are always a step and a half behind. When Nintendo started the whole “casual craze” (which wasn’t real anyway) with games like WiiSports, WiiPlay, WarioWare, Big Brain Academy, and even such games like Mario Strikers Charged, 3rd parties jumped on board to catch a piece of the prize. Unfortunately for them, they were a step and a half behind. A step behind because Nintendo had already grabbed much of the market with their games, and another half step because they missed what made Nintendo’s games appealing. They missed out on key points like the fact that being simple and fun and easy to pick up and play doesn’t mean the games can’t have depth, missed the memo that fun doesn’t simply mean moving the wiimote around, missed the brainstorming that went behind the Nintendo games, and what ultimately made them the high sellers (and big selling points of the Wii). Games like EA Playground, Brunswick Pro Bowling, and Nitrobike missed out on some of these key features, mainly depth.
Then, when Nintendo started moving upstream, as it was foretold in Malstrom’s articles, 3rd parties saw and were amazed, and quickly tried to move upstream with Nintendo. Unfortunately for the 3rd parties, they were a step behind Nintendo at bringing their higher-tiered games to the Wii, and a half step behind Nintendo because they had to use old ports to quickly get those types of games out there, for example House of the Dead 2&3, Okami, and Ghost Squad. Or they had to make quick games that lacked polish and depth, like Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 (lacked polish, with major bugs online, and depth, the story mode was short and pretty weak). Since these types of games don’t sell well, Nintendo once again dominates the sales charts.
And they’ll be behind as long as they only see what successes have been on the Wii, and not what successes could be on the Wii. When Nintendo releases Disaster: Day of Crisis, a new plateau will be set for mature games on the Wii, and 3rd parties will once again chase it, miss most of the reasons why that plateau is that high, and be too late to the party to get any of the cake.
Not all 3rd parties have had this problem though. Ubisoft did well with releasing Red Steel as a launch title, and the Rayman Raving Rabbids games capture much of the same magic as the WarioWare games do. MySims finally hit the right note, while there must be something about Carnival Games that keeps people coming back. EA is looking like they’re getting the hang of things with their sports titles. The Conduit could raise the bar for FPS on the Wii, and as such could become a big hit. The key is to beat Nintendo to the game. I’m sure Nintendo doesn’t care too much if you don’t create big games on the Wii. They’ll happily fill the void and makes loads of money.
So the solution to this problem is a combination of all the previously mentioned problems. Bring big name franchises to the Wii. This would eliminate Nintendo’s name recognition advantage, while at same time hopefully eliminating the quality advantage, and also probably beat Nintendo to a tier-level before they get to it. Advertise the game (correctly), and you’re 90% sure to have a hit on your hands. The demand for many types of games is there, someone just needs to come along and create a game worth buying to fill those voids. If 3rd parties don’t do it, Nintendo without a doubt will.
I would think that eventually some 3rd party will get it right. These are businesses, and as such I would hope that some of them have some business sense. I would actually expect the bigger 3rd parties to suffer the most if they don’t recognize this opportunity to establish new IPs on a console that currently has little competition in a few genres’s that Nintendo doesn’t focus on. Otherwise some smaller developers (like the developers of The Conduit) will establish their new IPs, and become larger developers, and become greater competition for the larger developers. Companies with established IPs would do well to get some of them on the Wii, for the simple fact that if other new IPs pop up without competition from a established one, they (the new IP) could become a greater threat to that already established IP. It just makes business sense to reduce future competition by suppressing the ability of a new IP to get off the ground by releasing a well known IP.
So the question is, will 3rd parties make their stand?
