Why do most hyped 360 games sell a million or more in its first few weeks before dropping off while many hyped Wii games start slowly, making people feel pessimistic about that game, but continue to sell for months?

I've noticed this trend for a while now, with few exceptions. What's up with the buyers on the 360 and the Wii?

Um, several reasons spring to mind

A higher proportion of the 360 audience are core gamers, who frequent sites like this, and consequently know the release dates of games as soon as they are announced.

In comparison, a higher proportion of the Wii's audience are casualz, who only hear about a game when it starts being advertised

Games on the Wii also (how to say this without being derogatory) have lasting appeal. Due to various reasons, a 360 game usually stops selling at all when the sequel comes out.

And this is probably going to be even more contentious - there're just too many good games for Wii owners to buy day 1 (once again, taking into account that the Wii's extended audience games less per week) I have a wishlist of released games longer than my list of purchased games, because there're just so many good and varied games, hence Wii games sell as people eventually go back through their Wishlist

Here in the UK the simple answer is advertisements, Nintendo are just too good at it. To this day I still see Mario Kart, SSBB etc adverts and that is simply not the case for 360 games which released months ago.

But what about games that seem to be no longer advertised, like MySims, for instance? It was crawling along and suddenly it exceeded 1 mill!

This also means that the Wii has plenty of games that can suddenly sneak past 1 million without anyone knowing.

Legs can be a powerful thing. Anyone remember Carnival Games? Everyone was quick to dismiss it and then it reached a million. Also I was one of the first to say that WiiFit would outsell GTA4 on the PS3 and 360 combined and people thought I was nuts. Now it's there. I still think Wiifit can reach like 30 million. I think it's been doing a steady 1 million a month since release.

best is both.

1. Demographics - It's definitely fair to say that the HD crowd are a little more enthusiastic about getting their products day 1. They pre-order, line-up, and watch release dates. Wii owners are more likely to go down to the game store once a month and look for something which they played at a friend's house or saw in an ad.

2. Retail Support - This plays into point 1, but gets into a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. A lot of Wii games are hard to find first day. Either they don't make it onto shelves, or too few make it onto shelves. Buying a Wii game on day 1 can be really hard to do sometimes, and personally, I've given up trying. Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes, CoD:WaW are all titles which have been known to be hard to find for the first week after release, and I know there are more. So do retailers not bother because the 1st day crowd isn't there for these games, or is the 1st day crowd not there because the retailers don't bother?

3. Install base growth - This doesn't explain small launches, but it does explain long legs. The Wii userbase is growing at a breakneck pace, and all those new users have to catch up on the game library. So they check out what got good reviews or what people tell them is good and start buying games. The HD consoles aren't growing as fast, so they don't have such a long tail.

HD games have to compete with a constant onslaught of big new releases while this isn't the case on Wii. Rapidly growing install base and casual buying habits could have something to do with it as well.

I'm sorry to bring this up.
But sometimes they just buy games with "Party" and "Games" in their title...

(well of course not all Wii owners do such stuff)

I think i prefer legs, because of them even not very popular games at first (de blob, boom blox) are able to sell great amounts after some time. It also sells more software overall and variety of titles.

Frontloaded Games do hurt sales of other less hyped and marketed titles, and they do struggle to recover.