Chicken and egg though, isn't it? How can the console appeal to the audience without the games, how can it have the games if it doesn't have the audience. Someone has to take a leap. (and EA were planning on doing this initially).
I'm not saying the onus is on them, I'm saying they can't act like they tried. They didn't. I'm not debating the reasons why they didn't (although it boils down to poor communication from Nintendo, poor developer tools, poor marketing from Nintendo etc which leads to low confidence in the platforms viability imo)
Regardless of the quality, it was still a several month old game which everyone had already played if they wanted to. Sales reflect that (I was one of the ones who hadn't played it, and enjoyed it thoroughly on WiiU)
In the mind of EA's decision makers, who have regularly released late up-ports of their annualized franchises at system launches and met success, they did put in "effort." The same effort as they have with other systems.
Fight Night Round 3 released 10 months after the initial versions and sold ~67K in first month, 53K second month.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) released 5 months late, was widely touted as the "definitive version" by people on here, and sold less than 10K in its first month.
The audience simply wasn't there. People are buying less software on the Wii U than past system launches, and they're gravitating towards other types of titles.
Further, there's this notion out there that if publishers build it, consumers will come. Obviously, sales of specific SKUs are hard to come by in this day and age, but can anyone cite a specific retail, multi-platform release on the Wii U that has performed well? Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed was the only thing I heard performing better, and even then, the only thing I heard was that it performed less poorly on the Wii U. Aside from that, it's not entirely clear to me that EA ports that weren't halfassed would have done much better, though I do understand that this is a highly speculative statement.
Specific titles have performed less badly, namely Scribblenauts, Just Dance 4, Zombi U, Lego City Stories and as you mentioned Sonic.
Consumer confidence, mainly. The bad news killed the WiiUs launch period as much as anything else. Everything was either cancelled,not coming or no one would even talk about it. It's a vicious cycle of bad news leading to low consumer confidence leading to bad news.
Bad news did not kill the Wii U launch period.
I don't know why people go to such lengths to try and explain away the poor performance of the system, when the simplest explanation is that it's fundamentally a flawed product for the market.
What attach rate is normal for a console launch? 2.0 seems pretty optimistic, so that's 8 million pieces of software?
The Xbox 360 had a launch tie ratio of 4 games per system in the launch month. The PS3's was over 2, iirc, for the launch period; and it was likely lower due to it being $599 to get the system itself.
The guy posits that maybe the audience on Facebook, the largest social networking site in existence, isn't there. With the possibility that he had the wrong game.
The wrong game for the audience. Wilson is right. Sure the larger the installed base, the greater the potential for there being a viable market within that installed base, but there may be better suited platforms. You can have a million potential consumers, but if your product isn't attuned to their proclivities it's not going to sell. You cannot make people want something they simply don't want.
How do you explain that demographic mysteriously not existing on Facebook, which is home to the vast, vast majority of PS360 owners?
Billions of people have and use Facebook, not all of them play games on it. I have a linkedin account too, alongside a few hundred million others; does that make it that a viable gaming platform as well?
How do you explain that demographic mysteriously not existing on Facebook, which is home to the vast, vast majority of PS360 owners?
Billions of people have Facebook, not all of them play games on it.
I just can't figure out why they'd make xbone and ps4 games then.
They expect the audience will be there. They expect transition, due to the hardware being an actual upgrade.
I don't understand how that undermines anything. One can argue that there are factors beyond Nintendo's own struggles that can explain lackluster software sales. However, I also think that it's disingenuous to ignore that there don't seem to be any real success stories on the platform right now, and certainly not with multiplatform stuff. You can argue that EA's struggles were a self-fulfilling prophecy, but be that as it may, the prophecy did indeed come true. And many other publishers seem to believe that as well.
Exactly. Bethesda isn't developing on the Wii U. Take-Two isn't developing on the Wii U. And those two companies made their bets long before the Wii U released as well. The system as a whole isn't geared towards the markets they target.
The problem is, EVERY port was late and/or gimped at least to some degree.
As is par for the course for platform launches. The publishers do not decide the platform holders system release dates. The Wii U isn't special in this regard, how it differs is that those titles performed far more abysmally than past precedents.
The narrative that all these core-oriented third party titles bombing on the system is because the installed base is just smarter and better and more discerning than other installed bases is little more than post-purchase rationalization. Just Dance 4 sold comparatively well, not because of ultra-refined tastes and thirst for quality.
