Good games are supposed to sell well. Unfortunately, this is proving not to be completely true on the Wii, leading 3rd party developers to produce high quality games on other consoles. A simple analysis follows that shows this effect.

The average of the top 10 selling 3rd party games on each platform are listed, along with the average metacritic score:

Wii: 3.40 mil / 65.6

PS3: 4.01 mil / 90.1

360: 5.81 mil / 89.1

A few key points: Despite the largest userbase, the top selling 3rd party titles sell less on the Wii than on the HD consoles. The PS3 and 360 have high metacritic scores of around 90, signifying that the owners of these consoles tend to purchase better (reviewed) games. Finally, the average score for the top 10 selling Wii games is actually almost the same as the 50th percentile score for all Wii games. Essentially, there's no difference between the average score for the top 10 selling Wii games and the average score for ALL Wii games released.

Next, the average of the top 10 scored 3rd party games on each platform, along with their corresponding sales:

Wii: 88.6 / .69 mil

PS3: 93.5 / 3.17 mil

360: 94.5 / 4.69 mil

The first point is that higher quality 3rd party games tend to release on the PS3 and 360, as their top 10 metacritic scores are 5-6 points above the Wii's. Comparing the metacritic scores / sales of the top 10 rated vs top 10 selling games on the PS3 and 360 shows there isn't much discrepancy between their sales/scores: high rated games sell well, and high selling games are rated well. When the same comparison is made for the Wii, it's clear that games that are well reviewed obviously do not sell well.

This seems to confirm that developing on the Wii is almost a crapshoot. Selling well on the Wii does not correlate to quality: spending money to produce a high quality Wii game is not a good investment. Clearly, 3rd parties have already picked up on this and are shifting their strategies accordingly.

It's difficult to justify thinking spectacular 3rd party Wii games will sell well when there isn't any evidence to support it.

You have to remember, reviewers are BIASED!

For example the conduit has 69% on meta but I can tell you it deserves more like 79% , if the game was twice as long then it sould be a tad more than 79% for me.

Whether or not reviews are biased, surely it doesn't matter as the point is a comparison to the other top Wii game scores, which would also suffer biased reviews?

Not saying I agree with this guys logic but biased reviews doesn't matter in the comparison to sales, just metacritic score.

Interesting analysis.

yeah, I agree with the guy saying reviewers are biased

Not necessarily.  Really it is a question of whether or not one can extrapolate the feelings of the majority of wii owners based on the reviewers.  As far as I am concerned, the answer would be no.

Reviews almost exclusively come from the enthusiast media. They are not representative of the tastes of the mainstream, and how they judge "quality".

*sigh*

I've had enough Wii doom and gloom for one week.Sure enough this stuff came in DROVES after the Wii sold more in a month than any console in history has ever done before, and a Mario game sold 10 million in two months.

I just have to ask........what companies spent all this money on Wii games and their titles fail? Saying these games don't sell on Wii is similar to this situation:

Bobby: Hey Paul, what is that you're eating?
Paul: Belgian Stiffyjon Bar.
Bobby: Eww, I hate those. They probably taste nasty?
Paul: How the fuck would you know? You've never eaten one?. I'll have you know its just a Snicker bar, y'know, like the same ones you scarfed down last Halloween? So ignorant........

*continues eating Snickers*

Blah blah blah... I just buy good games on Wii, Nintendo or 3rd party, that's all I care about. What a game sells is irrelevant to me.