The business model of some developers may have to change. They can try to compete for the top and risk losing everything, or perhaps scale back on lower budget titles that will earn a steady stream of income. Nintendo isn't going to stop making software anytime soon.

I said months ago, there will be a natural selection of developers. The poor economy is accelerating this evolution. Developers that can't figure out a way to be profitable will die, and there are many deaths coming.

The amount of games released does not, in fact, compare (I don't have the exact figures on hand, but I believe the ratio is roughly 4:3:2 Wii/360/PS3).

Nonetheless, you're making the assumption that sales are evenly distributed amongst those titles. Do you have any proof of that assertion? This site's data claims that the vast majority of Wii games (the shovelware, essentially) sells proportionate to their developers' efforts. Can you refute that?

While I personally agree, I feel compelled to omit this argument in this thread for two reasons. First, it's introducing an element that's immeasurable. Second, and more importantly, the stellar sales of many small-to-modest budget third-party Wii games (is there any other kind?) argue that the money thrown at the system does not translate directly into proportionate sales. I risk cheerleading if I continue this train of thought, so I'll limit myself to "you don't seem to need big budgets to get big sales."

While I pray that you're wrong, I know full well that you're not.

youre probobly right, im just bitter cus i buy cheap games by the bushel, and when i got wii i did that.  then i went back to the store and sold em all.

also im so mad i bought alone in the dark before reviews came out, so mad . .  .  

I think the numbers are skewed for the Wii due to the massive success of it's Top 5-10 titles. The 360 and PS3 don't have anything like MarioKart, Wii Fit or Wii Play which just keep selling at almost a direct attach rate for the life of the Wii so far.

SMG which is considered a moderate success sales wise for the Wii is about the same as the 360s Halo 3, which is about double the PS3's leading game in MGS4 and sales for that have pretty much stopped.

When you have first party titles selling 12million+ it's always going to throw out the numbers further down the table

If the Wii has 2x the releases that cost half as much to make as the 360, and a much lower % of them recover a fair portion of that cost, how is it that the Wii consumer is benefiting? I can see how Nintendo benefits... but not the consumer, nor the 3rd party publishers. Consumer satisfaction is kinda important for a console's continued health, and frankly, so is 3rd party support.

Actually, I'm quite happy to hear only 13% of the titles account for around 80% of the sales. Since that means around 70 titles get that 80% of sales and I don't think the Wii has more than 70 quality titles at the moment which actually deserve these kind of sales.

And no, those numbers are no where near pointing towards canibalization of sales or anything like that. It just proves that Wii has a lot of shovelware titles. They have a negative impact on these percentages for Wii, so unless we are actually able to filter them out we won't be able to get a good picture from these figures.

Who says the majority of Nintendo's customers aren't happy with their purchase? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that everyone doesn't like it.

nonmae- true but I think we know that mostly Wii is dominated by Nintendo's core franchises. But this is not unusual in a market for a majority of titles to dominate. Usually its well established franchises selling loads better than the rest. Well established franchises usually are a minority but always encompass a majority of sales.

Why does this happen? A few things. First, your majority buyers are mainstream buyers. Actually the funny thing is that mainstream buyers probably represent 80% of your gamers. Mainstream includes your casual gamers as some refer. The rest are your long time gamers or hobbyist. Yall call them the hardcore. Thus the mainstream buy the well established franchises and the rest buy the other good ones. NOw that doesn't mean it works exactly like that but you see the picture here.

Second, the majority of games don't get proper advertising nor are meant to gain huge sales. What we call shovelware. Sent out there to hopefully get a few thousand in sales and thats it. Sometimes games from smaller developers have similar effects like Mushroom Men. While a small percentage of games have the huge budgest and large marketing and take up the majority of sales like Need for Speed and Call of Duty.

Finally, establishing a new franchise is so difficult right now. Because the majority of your gamers are mainstream, selling a new product is almost impossible. Unless it's something like Assassin's Creed or Gears of War where it's so alike to everything else in its genre, then your not going to get anywhere. Thus these large new IPs go out and don't do to well despite have huge production value. Dead Space right now is the one that jumps out at me the most. EA has already complained about that one in similar terms.



But this is a problem in the whole industry and not just Wii, as some would like to think cough Stick. How to fix it is simply continue to make gaming more mainstream while transforming your average mainstream gamer to a hobbyist. Something Ninty has been trying since the DS.

For now, it's fine, but when 3rd party starts to really invest in the wii, do you think things will change ?

The wii demographic doesnt care about high budget games, they want to have fun. I think its going to be hard to compete against the Nintendo games.

the lazy ones may consider this the cause and then the lack of support becomes the consequence. I still haven't given up on this one, but I thought 2008 would be better already (Konami delaying PES 09, EA delaying Rock Band.. really..). but yeah, SEGA seems to be the best one recently.