The power of marketing can never be underestimated. Look at Halo for example. There were adverts everywhere for that game, on buses, on TV, on soft drinks - absolutely everywhere. Proper marketing can move a game from being pretty good to a cultural phenonemon. Too many publishers only put adverts for their games on gaming websites and I don't know how much of a difference that actually makes since the people visiting those sites are probably already going to buy the game anyway. I can't say an advert for a game on one of those websites ever swayed me into buying it.

You're absolutely right. That's why I always laughed when I heard people complain about the GTA series and wanted sales to stop. It was the same with the PMRC hearings back in 1985 that created the Parental Advisory sticker on CDs. The attention that products get due to complaints about them is basically free marketing. When a CD has the sticker on it, kids think "Ooh, it has bad words! I should buy it!" Same with GTA. The notoriety that name brought along caused it to become one of the biggest series of all time.

Case in point, Zack & Wiki. They advertised it in Japan only and look at what happened to that.............

The Wii games are a certain percentage cheaper anyways, so even if they spent $1 million advertising it, it would still cost far less to create,and potentially wield much better sales.

People can't buy a game they do not know exists.

I saw TV ads for it in the UK and I hardly ever watch TV so there must have been a fair few for me to catch one. Nintendo has heavily advertised it in its email newsletters, on its website and in the game inserts. It's just not the type of game that's going to hold mass appeal.

Problem is, look at where you found those advertisements. Not exactly catered to a mass market.

As for the UK TV adverts, where did you see them? The audience catered to in the commercial is important (I live in America so........)

Games like movies generally have a marketing budget equivalent to their production budget. The top games on 360 for instance are all high budget productions and have marketing budgets to match. Wii games are generally cheaper to make so have cheaper marketing budgets as well. If you start advertising Wii games with next gen marketing budgets then the value equation for the Wii starts going downhill fast.

Why does the Wii version of a multiplat title need specific advertising? The ps3 and 360 shared adds, why not the Wii? If you spend as much money advertising the Wii version as the HD versions combined then it becomes the most expensive console to develop for.

While true in a general sense, this does overlook the fact that the Wii version often goes unacknowledged in such commercials. And I mean that literally: ask around any forum, and you'll hear plenty of people tell you that the clerk at Store X (including many Gamestops) had no idea there was a Wii version of Call of Duty. And this is a month after the game was released.

It's not that surprising that the ad campaign Rol talked about sparked a dramatic increase in sales: before then, people literally didn't know that there was a Wii version to one of 2007's best-selling game.

Additionally, the Wii version tends to have very different features than their HD counterparts. Use of the Wiimote/Balance Board etc. often make playing the game quite different than the PS3/360 version of the same game. What this means, for purposes of this discussion, is that you (might) be better off emphasizing the cutting edge graphics and effects of the HD version, and emphasizing the controls and gameplay of the Wii version. For example, the HD version of Shaun White is much prettier, but any ad for the Wii version that doesn't show a group of people gathering around the Balance Board and having a good time is doomed to failure. It will be tough to do both approaches in the same commercial.

Nintendo itself understands this, which is why they go on about the differing philosophies of "see" and "touch," with their systems deliberately placed in the latter. The values and principles of one are not the same as the other: your marketers need to understand this difference in order to maximize the impact. That is why, for instance, Nintendo insisted on setting out kiosks and the like at major malls throughout the world, and why they introduced the Wii with the slogan that "playing is believing."

I have never seen a Zack & Wiki advert.

I guarantee that any Wii game that gets its own gamer fuel will outsell Halo 3.

@ noname2200 - good points, well made.

Yes, the Wii is quite different to the HD SKU's and probably requires specific marketing. This cost alot of money though and can make a Wii port of a ps3 game, for example, more expensive then a 360 port which can share marketing. It will be interesting to see how third parties go about targetting the Wii install base over the next two years.