There is a belief out there that Wii owners are more casual and as a result they tend to purchase their games further away from the release date and that this is the main reason for Wii game sales.

I disagree with this reasonning.

Personnally I think the reason most Wii games have very good legs is that Wii hardware is selling like hotcakes and every week new Wii owners pick up some software with their console and even if only 2% of them pick a given game, when you sell 300k units in a week that is 6k sales for the given game....

I didn't have much to back up my reasonning until the recent weeks where Wii sales have dipped a little ( from 300k to 200k so roughly 50% down).

Now if you take a look at the games with good legs right now on the Wii you will notice their sales have dipped by roughly the same percentage ( Mario Kart is down from 135k to 96k, COD:Waw is down from 27k to 15k, GH:WT from 50k to 31k...).

If the majority of the legs were coming from existing owners delaying their purchase the fact that Wii sales are down for a few weeks should not affect the legs of games that much as the behavior of a 50 million userbase should not be affected by the purchase intent of a few 100k new owners....

Interesting thing about this is that you can actually estimate quite precisely what will be the sales of a given software title if you know how many units the Wii sold that week.

Mario kart Wii works roughly on an amazin 40% pattern. Every week Mk Wii sales are roughly equal to 40% of the Wii unit sales for the week...

CoD:Waw works on a still very nice 6-8% pattern, every week 6 to 8% of the Wii unit sales translate into CoD:Waw sales.

The other thing you can actually notice is that if you were to take the HD console sales and artificially inflate them to Wii level you would notice some HD console titles have actually similar legs.

Little Big Planet still sells 14-15% of the PS3 weekly unit sales, the problem being that PS3 sales aren't that high on any given week...

So in the end I do not believe Wii customers buying patterns are that different from HD consoles.

The first 5-6 weeks or so following the release of a title the majority of the said console owners that are interested in the title purchase it, then legs are mostly influence by how many units said console can sell on any given week and the size of the existing user base has actually little impact on legs.....

So in conclusion, Wii games will have legs as long as the Wii sales like crazy, the day it stops, so most likely will the legs...

Interesting analysis.

That can be applied to all the consoles now and then

That is exactly my point. Debunking the fact that Wii owners have different purchasing behavior than HD console owners and are the reason for Wii legs...

Though, I must wonder, does it really matter why the legs are there when they have been proven on many accounts to be superior to the legs shown on most other consoles?

wii games have legs

It doesn't debunk the fact that Wii games do not have big openning week numbers (except main franchise Nintendo games) but sell well over time.

You are totally correct that certain titles are system sellers though - Wii Fit, Mario Kart, Halo 3, LBP, GTA IV will all sell to a certain percentage of new owners, week in and week out as they are a full or partial reason for the person to have bought that system.

Many Wii titles have had low 1st week numbers, actually increased week over week and then slowly dropped off again until they disappeared. Pinball Hall of Fame is one such title, Spyro, Nerf, and others all follow this trend.

Many are very slow burners - Mario Strikers, Mario Sluggers, Endless Ocean, Hanna Montana, Rayman Rabbids, Sonic etc. Where they debut relatively low and stay relatively low until they saturate their potential audience and then drop off but still make very good sales over the long haul.

Such titles are not effected by Wii hardware sales (much, some new owners will purchase them)

Thats the point the legs are only superior because more Wii units are being sold every week....

everyone has a valid point. i guess you could say im sitting on the fence for thos one.

That just shows that Wii million sellers have lower debuts, which shouldn't surprise anyone considering that games like GTA4 and Halo 3 can definitely skew results. I agree with Ail that high weekly hardware sales are really underestimated in favor of demographics. When GTA4 launched and the PS3 and 360 sold more, a lot of older games rose up (sports and other casual games specifically). However, it's not as exaggerated as Ail thinks.

If this post sounds funny, it's because I'm distracted right now.