"Yet for some reason you still have Cooking Mama selling copies even at 106 weeks old, Monster 4x4 at 123, and Rayman Raving Rabbids at 123."

I think those games keep selling because they're cheap and because they probably have good word of mouth.

We got to remember that a lot of the wii audience is made up by kids. These kids receive games from their parents and other relatives mostly. Now picture a parent at a store, he sees that shelf you snapped there. He thinks: hmmm... my kid loves to go to carnivals, maybe he'll like that carnival games game.

We parents tend to buy safe brands too, if a game is made by Disney and it has a license our kids like, they'll have a blast with it for sure, and you can be confident that the material they'll see will be safe.

They may seem like shovelware to most gamers, but to parents they're the perfect gift.

The ps2 has 1454 games with a metacritic score of 50% or higher, and 786 of 70% and higher.

Thats out of 1596 games.

Thats a pretty good ratio if you ask me.

That's still plenty of crap to go around.

Maybe its because they can't sell it so the retailers slowly start lowering the prices with Buy 2 get 1 free sales on "select" Wii titles such as Target did this past week. Of course the "select" titles were all shovelware.

Walmart had a bunch of shovelware wii games outside the case for sale the other day.

Nearly half the games on the PS2 are good, and almost all are decent.

Only 142 are horrible.

This is a faulty argument from the get go. Retailers keep reordering Carnival Games because it keeps selling. A nice steady dependable amount month in, month out. Metroid Prime no longer sells so they don't bother to reorder it when it sells out - why would they?

'Core' type games tend to only sell for the first two months and then are effectively dead. 'Casual' games tend to sell consistantly for months and months.

The exception here is shovelware. Shovelware doesn't sell at all. So it sits and sits on shelves until ultimately it gets put in the bargain bin and continually discounted until someone finally takes it off the stores hands. This DOES suck up shelf space that could better goto House of the Dead or Hanna Montana. So stores don't like it either.

*parrots*

Carnival Games IS shovelware.

Eventually the Wii's library, Just like PS2's will balance out. Longevity is the great equalizer. I think if someone does a metacritic rating, albeit a metacritic maybe a bad example, but I bet my sig, you will notice that the Wii's Metacritic scores from risen over the last few years.