Sorry to go off-topic, but when does MadWorld release?

Well, to this I would ad House of The Dead, Monster Hunter G and Tri and FF CC : Crystal Bearers


But I think it's already too late for the Wii : hardcore games have been in development since a few months or a year and will keep coming

Conduit needs to hit a million in the first two weeks and LTD of 3million to be taken seriously.  However, I don't think it will hit either of those goals . I just don't see the core Wii audience embracing this game.

That's ridiculous. At 3 mill it would be a phenomenal success considering the difference in budget between it and a HD FPS.

Interesting question, OP. Here’s a thoughtful answer …

There are two things that publishers will be interested in here:

First, what audience there currently is on the Wii for these types of game. That is a bit of an unknown given the mass-market ‘casual’ label the Wii attracts. You’ll get a picture of that from the first-month sales profile, as most of the target audience will be early adopters accustomed to front-loaded games.

Second, is whether additional gamers can be attracted to the Wii. And that includes all the ‘gathering dust’ crowd and all the ‘I sold my Wii’ crowd and all the ‘Wii is for kiddies’ crowd. Lots of them won’t have a Wii yet (or if they have one they are keeping quiet about it because it will harm their image!). Here, critical reception both by journos and on forums is important, and we’d be looking for short-term legs over the first three months or so of sales.

Nobody really thinks that the stereotypical Wii gamer is going to pick these up, but nobody really knows just how stereotypical we all are.

As to frontloading of sales, particularly shooter sales, that is really about competition between developers on a particular platform and the effect may not be so pronounced (at least yet) on the Wii because there is that much less competition in these genres.

As to these two games in particular …

Madworld looks a bit like a sheep in wolves clothing – a casual-ish game in gory attire. I’d expect it to be picked up by a particular demographic (trad gamer profile, 14-25 male) but for sales to be impacted by two other considerations. First, in this demographic most Wiis are in the living room as family machines while most other platforms aren’t – there maybe a reluctance to have graphic gore in that public a place. Second, gore is not universally appealing – probably US+UK sales is a better indicator than worldwide. I would expect Madworld to have a short, low spike and to pick up slowly as the target audience buy Wiis.

Conduit is more mainstream, more acceptable in the living-room. Again US+UK (and perhaps mainland Europe) are the markets to watch, but I would expect a higher spike than Madworld and maybe a surge at 2-3 months depending on critical reaction (as not too many will be jumping at it at launch).

As to expected sales, I would look for Conduit to sell 1m in three months and another million over the following nine. Madworld is just too odd to tell.

With the massive install base, anything below 1.5 million lifetime would be a massive failure imo, especially when you see the rate at which Ninty's own titles are flying off the shelves. Wii owners certainly buy games, as is apparent from the software charts, but it remains to be seen if they really appreciate 3rd party "core" efforts.

 This post was a massive failure imo. Since when does console install base= software sold. Thats like saying Halo 3 was a massive failure imo because it didnt sell 25mil.

I think most people would agree that The Conduit would do a good 1-2 mil, with Madworld being hard to tell, roughly 500K-800K.

What a strange response. It isn't the same at all, can you really argue that Halo 3 with 9 million + on a 28 million install base is not a huge success over 1 million on 50 million users? And, like I said, with 1st party titles breaking records right and left, it'd be all the more telling if the 3rd party efforts such as these two titles didn't sell well (well over 1 million). I never stated that they needed 50 million sales on 50 million users, that was your (puzzling) logic and idea. And of course install base matters on software sales, do you think Wii Sports would be at 43 million sold if there were only half as many Wii's? The many 5 million sellers on PS2 weren't/aren't due to just massive quality either, install base matters, and if you don't understand that you can't have any grasp on the nature of how bussiness works at all.

I do find comic relief in the fact that you singled out my post as a failure though, if I didn't know any better, I'd say it was almost personal.

The 10th of March for the US...