Wii After a Year

fearsomepirate

Dinosaur Hunter
Veteran
So Wii's about a year old now, and here are the facts:

1. In its first year, Wii has surpassed Xbox 360's WW sales, but not its NA sales.

2. No one doubts anymore that it's an overclocked Gamecube.

3. In one year, only seven Wii titles have a Metacritic rating above 85. 63% of Wii titles rank below 70. This puts Wii as possessing one of the most poorly rated libraries in all of console history, beating out only commercial failures such as Jaguar and Virtual Boy.

4. Nintendo has shown itself completely uninterested in advertising its own games. Mario Galaxy received little press for a flagship title, it practically kept Metroid Prime 3 a secret, it deliberately kept Battalion Wars limited at trade shows and out of the advertising stream, and so on. But as little as Nintendo advertises, 3rd parties advertise even less.

5. After a long period of games with bad controls, Retro finally nailed FPS controls with MP3. EA quickly followed suit with MOH:Heroes 2. Could more Wii FPSes be around the corner?

6. After one year, Wii has already exceeded 13m, more than 50% of either Gamecube or Xbox sales. Yet major game announcements from 3rd parties have been extremely scarce, and there do not appear to be any on the way. Where are the JRPGs, the shooters, the action titles? Third party sales aren't good, but overall, neither are the games. On the other hand, will gamers inevitably gravitate toward buying the games with the flashiest graphics?

7. Manhunt 2 came and went. After all the controversy, it turned out to not be worth playing anyway.

8. It's quite obvious that Nintendo is adamant about preventing online communication, and the overall brokenness of Wii's online gaming is deliberate rather than accidental.

My one-sentence summary: The future is questionable.
 
The Wii does some things very right and other things very wrong.

Nintendo did however advertise MP3. They created and dedicated a whole channel in its honor.

This morning I had a cup of coffee before leaving for work. Me and my flatmate checked the weather out, and then some global news. It was pleasant. It feels much more part of our home than the PS3 does or the XBox360 (which we also own but don't touch).

Nintendo's email messaging tends to work pretty well also. We wake up in the morning and notice the blue light on. We check the email. They use they're console as an advertising medium quite well.

Mind you, nothing drastic but it's certainly happening more often these days then at the start.

They organize little world community events such as the voting channel or silly contests like the new Mii Contest channel. For the first event we did a pretty cool Mario.

Overall, it's a very homely console. It feels like it belongs, and as much as one may argue the same for the PS3 and XBox360, for this home it isn't the case.

Peace
 
Do you have any theories on that, Scott? My theory when I'm a good mood is that it all got lost in the shuffle of NOA moving out of Redmond and many key advertising people quitting. After all, they seem to have advertised Galaxy in Japan much more effectively, and of course they advertised the heck out of the console itself. My theory when I'm in a bad mood is that Nintendo really doesn't consider new games to be much of a priority anymore, not when Wii Play and Mario Party 8 continue to chart week after week, and people are buying the console for Wii Sports anyway.
 
Wii has proven something that no other generation really took care of: price is king. That's my sole outtake
from this gen. I don't think it's waggle or the marketing or anything like that... Wii is doing well because it's the cheapest. If the PS3 and 360 was the same price with everything you needed (game storage, a game, etc) I don't think the Wii would be selling this well.

No way to prove it of course :p
 
I was actually going to make a thread similar to this but with a slightly different angle titled "What more can Nintendo do to encourage 3rd party sales?" .
Personally I think Nintendo has created a great platform with a lot of potential for 3rd parties.
A high installed base, cheap game and system price, lower dev costs ,a system that has demonstrated it can sell everything from Mario Party games to Resident Evil 4 type games,and they've made 3 AAA traditional games(Mario Galaxy,MP3 and Zelda) that demonstrate how well those game types can work with the new controller. I'm not sure what else Nintendo can do to encourage better 3rd party sales, make their own games crappier,make third parties games for them?
 
Wii has proven something that no other generation really took care of: price is king. That's my sole outtake
from this gen. I don't think it's waggle or the marketing or anything like that... Wii is doing well because it's the cheapest. If the PS3 and 360 was the same price with everything you needed (game storage, a game, etc) I don't think the Wii would be selling this well.

No way to prove it of course :p
Actually my opinion is opposite. Imagine the future Wii / PS3 / 360 are all $250 and still Wii is selling nicely if not like now, do you think it's unlikely? Oh well 360 Arcade is already $279.
 
Wii has succeeded in targeting a new audience, mainly by replacing monopoly, activity and other board/party games. Most owners usually keep it in the closet and play only a handful of games, not even thinking about buying new ones.
There is a relatively small part of its audience, composed mostly of longtime Nintendo fans, but they're in the minority.

This theory is supported by the lackluster sales of generally every third party title, MP3 and the unexpectedly slow start of SMG.

The future is hard to predict indeed; there are now enough 'traditional' games like the above mentioned Nintendo franchises and a few other upcoming titles that may convince core gamers to purchase the console in this holiday season, giving it additional sales momentum. Third party publishers may start to announce core titles that really take advantage of the Wiimote, or get into the social gaming market.
Wii Fit may also give it a boost, and I'm sure there's a fat profit on the thing. Actually, if Nintendo can keep coming up with such new input devices, they can probably keep the pace until the hardware cycle runs out, and they can even afford to be lazy with it.

On the other hand, it may happen that the new market wasn't that big after all, and combined with the lack of core games the sales may drop drastically. It seems to have lost its huge momentum in Japan, and the rest of the world may follow just as suddenly...
 
I was actually going to make a thread similar to this but with a slightly different angle titled "What more can Nintendo do to encourage 3rd party sales?"

Look at the review scores and you see. As fearsomepirate pointed out, the Wii's software library is one of the lowest rated in history. I bet you none of those were first party Nintendo games though. Who bought Far Cry on the Wii? How about Ninjabread Man? No one? People always point to shitty sales of shitty games on the Wii as reason why third party games don't sell.

As for advertising, Nintendo's pretty much ignored advertising since the very beginning of the Gamecube's life. About the only game I can think of with any advertising campaign was the first Metroid Prime. They are advertising Galaxy pretty heavily right now, but I guess they'll probably stick with advertising one game each generation and be happy with it.

2. No one doubts anymore that it's an overclocked Gamecube.

The only thing that really pisses me off is that they still use dithering in their games. Goddammit, is it too much to ask to display 16.7 million colors? The irony is that the Wii will be getting some of the more colorful games compared to other systems.
 
Do you have any theories on that, Scott? My theory when I'm a good mood is that it all got lost in the shuffle of NOA moving out of Redmond and many key advertising people quitting. After all, they seem to have advertised Galaxy in Japan much more effectively, and of course they advertised the heck out of the console itself. My theory when I'm in a bad mood is that Nintendo really doesn't consider new games to be much of a priority anymore, not when Wii Play and Mario Party 8 continue to chart week after week, and people are buying the console for Wii Sports anyway.

I have no idea. Super Mario Galaxy is an awesome game. Metroid Prime 3 was an awesome game. I have seen one single mario galaxy advertisement, and I don't think I ever saw a metroid prime 3 ad. My tv viewing is pretty slim these days, but I saw the Halo3 ad quite a bit, and I've seen the Heavenly Sword ad and the new PS3 ads A LOT. I've seen quite a few ads for Xbox360 and other Xbox360 titles as well. For whatever reason, Nintendo doesn't think it's important. Mario Galaxy should be huge, but I don't think it will be.
 
I'm surprised at how poor a job Nintendo has done of advertising it's titles.

I think everyone is and the same with third parties.

My only possible theory is they've decided if we completely cut marketing budget we can make more money overall with lower risk involved.
 
I don't know that I would agree that MP3 was under advertised, I know I saw a lot of advertising in and around its release. Whether it was effective or not was questionable (I know nothing in their ads wanted to make me buy the game).

If advertising for N games is limited perhaps its a case of scaling with budgets. There's nothing cheaper about advertising for a Nintendo game than there is about advertising for any other game.
 
I don't know that I would agree that MP3 was under advertised, I know I saw a lot of advertising in and around its release. Whether it was effective or not was questionable (I know nothing in their ads wanted to make me buy the game).

If advertising for N games is limited perhaps its a case of scaling with budgets. There's nothing cheaper about advertising for a Nintendo game than there is about advertising for any other game.

Hmm, maybe they have a different strategy for targeted advertising, because I never saw a single add for Metroid. Could be the shows I'm watching are targeted by MS and Sony more heavily than Nintendo.

I just don't think it makes sense to make a product and not advertise it. Maybe Nintendo underrates tv and film ads, and thinks the internet rag previews/reviews are good enough.
 
I see a lot of Wii ads on TV here in germany, as well as SMG ads at least every hour. Dunno about the rest of the world though. And I know many people who are buying Wii for christmass.

I enjoyed Zelda, RE4 etc., but still I always come back to Wii Sports. It's just fun playing it with friends and didn't lose it's appeal for me. I think it still is the strongest seller for the console. I wonder why we don't see any sports games from 3rd party devs, this is where Wii is truly at home I'd say.
 
Nintendo has one of the greatest marketing tricks going, and has since day one: word of mouth. I agree that this is not a reason (intentional or otherwise) to sleep in the marketing department, but there is an incredible amount of good going around about their product and most of their inhouse developed titles. I think the mystique also adds to it a little, but that's just a purly personal interpretation.

I'd like to know what they are doing with all the money they are making, i don't see them using it all on next gen R
 
I agree on the marketing part, games like MP3 and SMG deserve alot more marketing as they really are games people will enjoy. As for 3rd party games, there seems to be some above decent stuff coming out by the end of the year so that atleast is going better than at the beginning with all the crappy mini games but im still kinda worried if there will be more real big projects from 3rd party devs.

Fortunatly the wii isnt very expensive so even if massive support doesnt happen the nintendo titels and those relative scarse good 3rd party games will be enough for me hopefully. OTOH if I look at ps3 or x360 they dont really have more games that I would want to play than Wii has.
 
So maybe the poor marketing is more of an NOA problem than a worldwide problem. I don't see how SMG sales have been "unexpectedly slow." ~250K in the first 2 days in Japan isn't slow, especially when that's about how well its predecessor did. And unlike its predecessor, it's not following up arguably one of the best games of all time.

The only 85+ game to not break 250K is Zack & Wiki. Guitar Hero III recently came out, and I wouldn't be surprised if it breaks at least .5m over the course of its life.
 
I pretty much agree with everything said in the first post. I've had my Wii since launch and really haven't played it much other then 2 or 3 times I had a few people over. most of the games on the platform aren't selling well, aren't rated well and aren't Nintendo created games. The only titles I will buy for this system are made by Nintendo.
 
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