| | Rumors! Wild Speculation!
Fictional Portents of DOOM!
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Dear readers:
If you do not care about videogames and the business of creating them, you'll probably want to go read something else. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Also, in the interest of full disclosure, let it be known that I own both a Wii and an Xbox 360. I own 10 games for the Wii and 5 games for the 360, not counting Virtual Console or Live Arcade. I also own stock in Nintendo, but that's simply because I saw the writing on the wall at E3 '05 and as a general rule I'm not against easy money. Regardless, I'm going to base this discussion around an elusive tool called "logic." So if we're lucky, I might actually make a decent point.
If you've read this far and you're still with me… you're probably a huge nerd. But you passed the test, so read on.
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So there have been rumors swirling around lately to the effect that the Wii has reached its peak of popularity and its future will be a sad, downward spiral. Ordinarily, I wouldn't pay any mind, because usually those kinds of "news stories" turn out to be sponsored by Sony. But this time, some reputable sources have gotten in on the action.
Anyway, part of the rumor centers around the claim that third-party games do not sell on the Wii. While it is certainly true that third-party software can make or break a console, and that Nintendo's first-party games typically outsell third-party ones, I am suggesting that perhaps the assumption that the Wii's third-party sales are "weak" is still flawed. My theory is that the outlook for the third-party guys isn't as bleak as some people would have you believe.
There are those who would point at the games-to-hardware ratios to support their claims. The average Wii owner only purchases 3.7 games per year, while X360 owners buy 4.7 games and PS3 owners 4.6 games per year. Oh, the horror! Surely this statistic doth bode ill for teh futures!
The problem here is the classic trick of "taking things out of context," which can be a great tool when you want to convince people of something and you're pretty sure they're not paying very close attention. But before we get too carried away, I just want to re-examine the fact that the Wii console itself has outsold its rivals virtually every month of its existence. What this means is that there are a lot of Wii systems out there.
Nintendo just released their financial report for the fiscal year, and if I'm reading it correctly their numbers show that they've sold a little more than 24 million Wii systems worldwide so far. Now, you'll have to bear with me because Microsoft and Sony haven't released their yearly reports yet, but by extrapolating data that is only a couple months old I am tentatively guessing that it'll come out to around 19 million total units of Xbox360 and probably 12-13 million PS3's sold so far. For the sake of argument I'll say 13 million PS3's. Update: I just checked VGChartz and they’ve got the Xbox at 18.35 million and the PS3 at 11.9 million, so my estimates were a little high for those systems.
Alright, now let's say you're a third-party developer/publisher and your dream is to achieve the legendary “million-seller” status. To achieve that feat with a Wii title, you would need 4% of all Wii owners to buy your game. Even with the large amount of Wii games fighting for shelf space, 4% isn’t an unreasonable market penetration. And to date, of the 25 Wii games that have achieved million-seller status, 10 of them were published by a third-party. That ain’t too bad.
Now, let’s say you're that same third-party developer or publisher, but now you want to sell a million copies on the Playstation 3. You're going to need more than 8% of all PS3 owners to purchase your game. For the record, at the time of this writing, 12 games have achieved million-seller status on PS3, with 8 of them being from third-party publishers.
Now, bear in mind this is just a different way of looking at numbers. A million copies is a million copies, and it’s very possible that the interests of all PS3 owners overlap enough that 8% penetration is not a scary target for your product. I’m just putting things into perspective regarding the potential sales that a “niche” game can have when your user base is larger.
But wait! There's more! If you also take into account that the target audience for the Wii is much broader than the traditional "gamer" market, spanning the breadth from pre-teens to senior citizens, you might even find it quite remarkable that the average owner is buying 3.5 games per year. I mean, if some of these "journalists" are right in their assumptions that all the "hardcore" gamers are gravitating to the Xbox 360 and PS3, while the "casual" owners of the Wii are notorious for buying nothing beyond Wii Sports… Then who the heck is buying all those millions of games? (Fanboys, insert gif of a Wii printing money or a clip of a Jon Stewart smirky-shrug here.)
Moving on… Furthering the doom and gloom forecast, multiple sites have made “alarming” reports that after a strong opening week, the sales numbers for Smash Bros: Brawl have been dropping off! Gasp!
Surely this would be terrifying if not for the fact that, uh… that's pretty much exactly what happens when every highly-anticipated game is released.
The thing with rabid fanboys for any popular gaming franchise, be it Smash Bros or Halo or Metal Gear Solid, is that they tend to pre-order games. To my knowledge, those pre-orders typically count as sales for Week One. Now, does anyone out there actually believe that Halo 3 sold nearly as many copies in its third week as it did during the first week when hundreds of thousands of preorders were filled? No. But you know what? I bet they were still pretty dang big. Because when you're talking about "millions" of anything, you can decrease your number by quite a few percent and still be left with a very large number. Funny how that works.
And, on that note, I'd like to remind the audience that Smash Bros: Brawl sold 2.7 million copies in the first month. To my knowledge, this single-month record fails to surpass the 3.3 million mark set by Halo 3, but still stands as one of the biggest single-month sales records in gaming history. And it performed that feat not during the holiday season, but during March, a month not typically known for stellar game sales. Bear in mind that if Smash Bros: Brawl failed to sell a single copy beyond today, it would already be a major success by anyone’s standards. And yet this is what you come to me with to "prove" to me that Nintendo's popularity is waning?
For lack of a smoother segue, I’m just going to jump tracks to my final issue: Shovelware. Or, rather, the casual games that are so easily called shovelware by the hardcore gamer crowd. I’m not denying that there are publishers out there who are kicking out half-baked garbage onto the Wii just to make a few quick bucks. But I’m also a firm believer that “simple” doesn’t always mean “bad.” At least, not for all audiences.
The thing that so many gamer sites apparently keep forgetting is that they are only a small part of the target demographic for the Wii. No matter how good Okami may be, your grandma probably isn’t interested. But Carnival Games? Oh hells yeah, she be all up on that. I haven’t actually played Carnival Games, and I’m not saying that I’d like it if I did. But just like some “serious” movie reviewers have no business critiquing an action movie when they’re incapable of appreciating the genre, I’m not sure MY review of Carnival Games would even be appropriate.
And there’s the rub, as they say. It is entirely possible for a game to have no story and be lacking in depth and have no artistic merit and still be a great source of entertainment for someone who has no eye for those things. And like it or not, Nintendo has cast their nets wide enough with the Wii that they have created a legitimate market for that kind of game. Hardcore gamers are just going to have to accept that their hobby has gone mainstream. Like rock and roll, videogames are no longer anti-establishment. It’s just part of the growth of the industry. And I think, contrary to the doomsayers’ rumors, that the trend is going to continue.
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| | Posted 4/28/2008 5:57 PM - 83 Views - 8 eProps - 7 comments
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