While quality games sometimes don't sell, I agree with his sentiment: "... if the game doesn't sell, we did something wrong." If a quality game doesn't sell, it's simply because the developers didn't tailor-make it to suit the user base.

Among the people who play the Wii for more casual titles, games like No More Heroes and Madworld won't sell well (and they didn't). Those games sold because more 'hardcore' people bought them. The problem is that most of those people have already resided on the 360 and PS3. It's not impossible to pull them away, the developers simply have to give them a compelling reason to.

If the Nintendo brand games haven't done the job then the third parties have their work cut out for them. Glad to know this developer at least partially understands that. =]

No, the reason those games didn't sell well is because they're niche titles ...

In every year, on every platform, there are several titles that don't sell particularly well because they don't have broad appeal; and people will blame practically everyone except for the developer as an excuse for why these games didn't sell well. Often one or more design decisions results in a product that is very undesireable in the eyes of most consumers, and (while it is impossible to say for sure) the art direction of both Mad World and No More Heroes is similar to styles of a lot of games that have failed to connect with consumers.

Madworld wouldn't have sold better on the HD systems. Little game time and no replay value.

And No More Heroes did sell well. It was the guy's bestselling game and it's getting a sequel. How the hell does that make it not sell well?

There is a misconception among many people in this thread. You don't need to be a million seller to be a success. If this was true, the game industry would be bankrupted by now. The fact is, concentrating only in the million plus seller, you lose the perspective, as those are exceptions and not the norm of the market.

Most successful games sells significantly less than a million as they still are very profitable compared to development and marketing costs. I am pretty sure No More Heroes was successful, as it is getting a sequel. MadWorld made a buck and was a profitable release. If their sales were within the expectations is another thing. I believe NMH was whereas MadWorld wasn't.

It used to be that a million seller was the magic number, like making $300 million at the domestic box office is now. It's not required for smaller films, but its awesome of a film makes that much.

It's only with HD games that a million is required in general instead of just for the big budget games. So applying that standard to Wii games is ignorant at best, flat out slander/libel at worst (as in deliberately lying to hurt the Wii's reputation, which may be the very point of this disinformation).

On top of this few publishers expect to profit off of most of the games they release, and there are many titles that have been released with remarkably low expectations (and potentially the expectation of taking a loss on it) because publishers believe (or at least they used to believe) that if you give a good studio resources to make games they will eventually have a hit that recovers all of the money invested in them. The arithmetic for this is pretty simple because if a game requires 250,000 copies sold to break even and the game sells 200,000 copies it produces a “deficit” of 50,000 copies; and if they released a game with a similar deficit every year for a decade this would work up to a 500,000 unit deficit. Eventually, if the studio does get its big hit, this studio could produce a title that sold 2 Million more than its development cost, and could get a couple of sequels out at these sales, and the profit from this one series easily covers the cost and opportunity cost of their earlier titles.

It's not just bad Wii games. Badly-marketed Wii games also sell badly. The amount of skimping on advertising that third party developers (and even first-party developers, for games without the word 'Wii' in the title) is not only grossly incompetent, but also a self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't matter how good your game is if nobody knows that it even exists.

"It doesn't matter how good your game is if nobody knows that it even exists."

I hate that as well.

Definitely.

Not everything has to be a huge seller either.  As long as you know your game doesn't have wide appeal, and keep the budget low enough, you will be ok.  Even despite the forums calling your game a flop.