Yes and GH:WT and RB2 are getting MAJOR press and exposure from retail store.

My local best Buy now has two rows dedicated to just those two games as well as 2 areas where you can try either and I can tell you people of all ages are trying and more than a few just stop to watch them...

Most people don't want to make the investment to learn how to play music. But give them something that make it looks like they are playing like a rockstar ( which was the dream of many when as a teenagers) and they jump into it...

I agree with most of the opening post, with a couple things I'd like to add.

First, Wii Music isn't as accessible as Rock Band in terms of gameplay, but it's way more accessible in terms of price and peripherals. Gameplay is more important, but the peripheral requirement is a barrier that Wii Music doesn't suffer from.

Second, as everybody else has pointed out, it is way too early to call the game a sales failure. It's unreasonable to call a total below 10 million a flop just because this game carries the Wii brand. I think a performance of 5 million would be very impressive. I'm not convinced it will reach that, but it could surprise us all and go Brain Training on us.

In conclusion, this is a fun prediction you have, just don't pretend that it's already come to pass. :3

@gamerace,

I see your point. But still is unlikely that MS and Sony grasp future Wii market just scaring people saying Wii won't have big releases anymore.

IMHO a better title for this thread would be "Miyamoto's mistake and what it'll cost Nintendo", refering in relying into older 1st party titles, since that's a possibility it can't be ruled out by now.

 Yeah, 'commercial failure' was poor wording on my part.  It'll succeed commercially just not on the level wanted.

As to your other point, you are right, MS and Sony are not well positioned.  However they are masters of marketing and that's the danger.   Sony used false marketing to push Sega out of the console business (claiming PS2 would be more powerful and cheaper), used marketing to label GC a kiddie system - a label Nintendo never escaped last gen despite having more 'core' games for GC than Wii.     If they can convince people Wii is a fad, which admitted is still a big IF then Nintendo could be challenged to maintain it's market dominance.   My point is they may have given the competition an openning.  That's all.  We'll see what happens. 

I think a good gauge of Wii Music success would be if it can sell more than GH:WT on the Wii so i am putting the bar even lower...

@gamerace
you are not allowed to say bad things about the wii.
but i do agree its been done better. Done better 15 years ago by mario paint.

Two weeks is too soon. Boom Blox was dismissed as a failure after a month. It's sold half a million copies.

As for this game, from everything I hear that isn't bashing, it's meant to encourage creativity, like Mario Paint and Little Big Planet.

Wii Music may not be what Nintendo hoped it would be, but how it changes sales of Wii consoles doesn't make sense.

I know of a few people looking to pick up a Wii for Christmas and guess what? Not one of them ever said that they wanted a Wii for Wii Music or because of all the great games coming out next year. They all want it for Wii Sports and/or Wii Fit. If Nintendo makes a game that is a miss all it means is that current Wii owners won't buy it and sales for the game itself will suffer. Console sales cannot be stopped.

I considered that too, but I don't think that's the case, to be honest. I meant what I said about Sony and Microsoft's Gaming divisions not really knowing what the mass public thinks; the examples of their past successese are, I believe, examples of how they were able to manipulate the traditional gamer (13-25 male) into thinking what they wanted them too. The vast majority of the population, though, probably never heard that the GameCube was "kiddy," let alone cared. They bought their PlayStations because that's where the games that appealed to them were at the time, not because the other systems weren't cool enough for them.

And that, I believe, is the problem they face now, marketing-wise. Sony and Microsoft don't seem to know how to talk to the demographic that is increasingly visible and potent in its buying power, and Sony at least is getting rid of the few executives who have that knowledge and skill. They can try to portray the Wii as a fad, of course, but they've been trying to do that for two years with no success, and I don't really see why they'll succeed if Wii Music fails.

You did, however, allude to another argument which I believe has merit, namely that Wii Music's (relative!) lack of traction may slow down the Wii's momentum with the general public. After all, for all our talk about "casuals" being a monolithic group they are composed of far more diverse sub-parts than traditional gamers. And if Nintendo can't find something new to attract folks after Wii Sports and Wii Fit have tapped themselves out, they'll face their first real hurdle this generation.

Still, I woulnd't worry about it for two reasons: first, Wii Music hasn't proven to be a failure yet, not even in the sense you meant, and I'm actually pretty sure it'll do a good job in the long run of further expanding the Wii's userbase. Second, the momentum from the earlier games is still going strong after all this time, and will likely be sustained long enough for Nintendo to come out with the Next Big Thing.

One last note, this one about Japan: at this point the Wii's sold more there than the PS2 did in the same timeframe. It's actually doing fantastic there too; it only looks bad in comparison to how smashing it's doing here in the West. Although the Japanese migration to the handhelds is something that all three console manufacturers are going to have to compensate for in the future.

It's absolutely ridiculous to call a game a failure commercially or sales wise just because it didn't sell a million right out of the gate. The game will sell at least a couple million copies and maybe quite a bit more. Lets at least wait until after the holidays to see how it does then. I'm pretty sure that it will be a big holiday game.

I don't see the point of ripping Nintendo and so many saying that Nintendo isn't giving us the big games. It hasn't been out two full years yet and already we've seen games from some of their biggest franchises such as Zelda, Mario, Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Warioware, Wario, Metroid with Animal Crossing coming out in less than two weeks and Pikmin 3 announced. The system has at least another three or four years still and we'll see many other big Nintendo franchises and probably a few sequels to the franchises that have come out.

It's the 3rd party that has left us disappointed thus far but I see that changing dramatically in 2009 and after.