| Ail said: 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...
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I'm not sure what your point is, and why you think any of this is new to anyone.
You pointed out that MK:Wii sells about 40% of what the Wii does each week. You're wrong of course, it's actually just over 50%.
Wii Play sells just under 50%
Wii Fit sells 60-120% depending on the week.
Wii Sports obviously sells around the 95% mark worldwide, and I believe it sells at around 40% in Japan where it is unbundled and full price.
You then point out LBP, which is far from a typical PS360 game. Even after this horrendous cherry pick, you then say that it sells at about 1/4 the attach ratio of any of the top selling Wii games.
And think about what you're proposing. Wii sales are likely to follow a similar pattern to the DS, with sales peaking in it's 4th year, and likely decreasing only marginally in the 5th. How many copies will Wii Fit have sold by then?? That sounds like Wii games have incredible legs to me
