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Editorial: Nintendo’s Wii Is The Gaming Industry’s Financial Scapegoat
By William Usher: 2007-08-05 23:05:00
This article isn’t just coming hot off the trails of a review that significantly points out the current marketing direction for software on Wii (i.e., Alien Syndrome). But the importance of this article has been building up over the last few months due to the alarming rate of ill-conceived and indolently made games for the Wii. This started with the preconceived direction of Nintendo abandoning the hardcore gamer and now it’s built up into a rather obvious scheme by publishers within the gaming industry to quickly cash-in on a hot product.
If a company such as Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony allows publishers to let a certain kind of game get developed and published for their system, then they’re basically saying that it meets a certain minimum standard of quality in order to land on a retailer’s shelf. Now such rules and regulations come in all shapes, forms and leniencies; gamers from the old-school days might remember Nintendo cracking down hard on “red blood” in games on the SNES and N64. They were also rather timid with the amount of ‘M’ rated games that landed on the Gamecube. Nintendo has always played a huge factor in the kind of games publishers released and/or distributed onto a Nintendo made console. And the same still applies for the nine-month old Wii...only Nintendo isn't putting a cap on the kind of ill-made games that publishers have been letting slip through as of late. Now it doesn’t take a genius (or a hardcore gamer) to realize that the current offerings on Nintendo’s Wii have been stark awful, with the exception of Twilight Princess and Paper Mario. This is not to say that games like Project Sylpheed, Hour of Victory or Vampire Rain haven’t left bad tastes in the mouths of Xbox 360 or PC gamers. But this is to point out that surrounding the releases of both of Microsoft’s Vampire Rain and Project Sylpheed was Forza Motorsport 2 and the upcoming Halo 3. The latter are anything but bargain-bin bait. Even Midway’s Hour of Victory will be followed by the likes of Unreal Tournament III and John Woo Presents Stranglehold. Alternatively, the Wii has been surrounded by some of the worst reviewed games of the year...some of these games have even been published by Nintendo. Mario Party 8, Wii Play and Excite Truck have all been catered toward casual gamers. They were also quite terrible. Third party support hasn’t been much better, as some of the titles included Call of Heroes: Pompolic Wars, Cooking Mama and the recently released Alien Syndrome. Both of those games also received terrible review scores. Accompany these titles with multi-platform releases such as The Bigs, Pirates of the Caribbeans, Spider-Man 3 and Transformers, and you still have games that received terrible review scores for the Wii and sales which aren't very laudable either.  What’s horribly apparent is that review scores mean very little when compared to the actual quality of the game. But in this case, gamers and critics aren’t very far off from one another with the fore-mentioned games, because we reviewed them ourselves and they really are that bad. All of the former titles were equally sub-par or even a little less than sub-par when measured against Gamecube titles that appeared within six months of the console's launch. Luigi's Mansion, Eternal Darkness, and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader run complete circles around Wii titles such as Cooking Mama, Red Steel, and Excite Truck.
What’s worse is that there’s still more crap to come for the Wii; nearly 100 more games are due out for Nintendo’s console before the year is out. Now I’m all for a lot of games for a new console, but it has to be alarming to know that over 200 games will be widely available for the Nintendo Wii before 2008. Nintendo is even pushing for developers to expand the Wii’s library at a very quick pace. This entire scenario obviously makes me question how on earth the developers are going to be able to make these games so darn fast? Or port such titles over without glitches or major gameplay drawbacks? This is also considering that the Xbox 360 had a steady flow of games that came out during its first year, and even those games weren’t all that great, save for a few good gems. So how do developers expect to make quality products in such a short time of working with the new hardware? It's literally the complete opposite of what's happening over at the Sony camp with the PS3. Where the development time and cost are preventing games from being put out quickly for Sony's new console. Nevertheless, while developers may be pumping these games out at an exceedingly fast rate (and with equally low quality), one has to wonder if the abundance of games have equaled out to higher sales for software. One would think that with all the talk about Nintendo’s Wii and with the SKUs sky rocketing in sales that there would be equal amounts of software being sold. In some cases that does hold true. Mario Party 8 and Wii Play have dominated the charts since their respective releases. However, the only Wii games that consistently sell are Pokemon Battle Revolution, Wii Sports, Wii Play and Mario Party 8. But what happened to games like Cooking Mama? What happened to Tiger Woods, what happened to Transformers, Spider-Man, and Harry Potter? What’s even more sad is that Capcom’s Resident Evil 4, a highly anticipated release for the Wii, is just barely within the top ten games in software sales for June. In fact, out of the estimated 100 available titles on the Wii, only the same games appear in the top ten sales for software consistently: Mario Party 8, Wii Play and Wii Sports (according to its automatic bundle with the Wii).  In essence, these cheapskate games and half-witted ports that are being pumped out for the Wii are barely leaving the retailer shelves. So while developers may think they’re using the Wii as a financial scapegoat from having to invest large sums of money into a big-budget project. They have completely forgotten that the Wii’s attachment rate is still a crap shoot. Yes, Mario Party 8 and Wii Play – as we covered – are selling well alongside the Wii. But all those other 100+ titles out there are falling through the cracks, and direly being left behind in sales. Especially for this to be the Wii’s first year on the market.
Majority of the audience who purchases a Wii don’t seem to care about games like Alien Syndrome, The Bigs, Excite Truck or Transformers. And before anyone should retort that the reason the games aren’t selling is because they aren’t good, you should take note that Spider-Man 3 and Transformers for the PS2 have both sold very well, despite awful review scores. If you recall, even though the PS2 had a much higher installed base than the Xbox, games like Scarface, Madden and NCAA football still held pretty close ties in software sales. In fact, games like Scarface, Medal of Honor and James Bond 007 went platinum for both the Xbox and PS2, despite the PS2's larger installed base. Xbox gamers were just more devoted, despite having a smaller share of the market. And in this case, there's more than 9 million people who own a Wii and less than 200,000 of them are willing to purchase the same game that's on the other consoles. It's an obvious lack of devotion when it comes to the Wii. It also seems apparent enough that Wii gamers are either very picky or completely oblivious to the other software titles out there besides Wii Sports. Publishers need to realize that casual gamers don't play games very often and hardcore gamers don’t give a crap about crappy games. And while the Wii looks like a great opportunity for video game publishers to cash-in on a gullible and naive consumer (i.e., the casual gamer) gamers and video game journalist really need to step up and let their voice be heard against this pathetic and money-hungry tactic. Alternatively, Nintendo really needs to step up and be the guiding light for other publishers out there. They need to either regulate the kind of quality that’s being put into these games or at least show that the Wii can have quality made games that match their quality made retail prices. Because after Metroid and Mario are out and about, gamers will be left with Nitro Bike sequels, unplayably bad Ghost Squad shooters and Alien Syndrome spin-offs.
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