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NPD Sales Results for December 2009
- Thread starter EviLore
- Start date
ShockingAlberto
Member
Kind of.Gwanatu T said:
These companies make new hires with new projects a lot and these days when you go to school for video game design, you learn a lot of UE3. Basically, skills that are not applicable to the Wii. The guys that were making great games last generation want to be making great games with the technology to do everything they want within rational limits.
While it may bother a GAFer to see a low-res wall texture stretched across the screen, it bothers a game designer way more.
So you have people that don't want to work on the wii but will if they're ordered to and people that have no idea how to work on the Wii and are probably the ones making the games for it.
Seriously, I find the abuse of PR talk in both message boards and gaming sites frightening.Sadist said:If there is something that I hate this gen, it's all the terms that were made up by the industry.
And messageboards types like us just copy-paste it. Well, some of us.
Version 3.0
Member
obaidr said:
Publicly available data shows that Wii owners buy, on average, exactly the same number of games as Xbox 360 or PS3 owners. So while the answer to your question is unknown, your implication that most of the sales were to people who buy very few games is dead wrong. If there are a lot of Wii owners buying few games, then there are some Wii owners out there who are buying tons of them to average it out.
obaidr said:
The 360 was cheaper than the Wii for a good portion of the year. If "every core gamer" should have already bought a Wii, then the same should be just as true for the 360. By your own logic, I guess Xbox 360's are being sold to casual buyers who won't buy many games, too.
Okay so next december Wii will probably take 4 to 6 out of the top 10 once again.. all nintendo of course.. and those publishers will fight over the remaining 3 or 4 spots (since there will be some DS games that sell too..)obaidr said:
seems to be a fair deal for third parties to me
ShockingAlberto
Member
But will it sell?Jocchan said:
Pureauthor
Member
mclem said:
Tea is a Nintendo 1st party title - everyone loves it!
Aaron Strife
Banned
That's really too bad. I think they could have stolen Capcom's thunder in a lot of ways ("fuck those guys, they're just giving you some crappy rail shooters, check out this awesome scary game")ShockingAlberto said:
ShockingAlberto
Member
Tea Sports will be a breakout hit.Pureauthor said:
If I only had a Wii, I would have purchased New Super Mario Bros, Muramasa, A Boy and His Blob, and possibly Silent Hill.jay said:
Instead, I got Demon's Souls, Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Now, even with deflated prices for a number of the aforementioned Wii titles, there's a good chance I will never purchase any of them.
Generally, there's a good chance I would have enjoyed those games as much as a number of the other titles I bought (probably not Demon's Souls, but anything else), but they still were further from my radar than corresponding 360/PS3 games, and so I didn't value them as highly. Now, I've moved on to a bunch of PC games I got for very cheap during Steam's Holiday Sale and Bayonetta, and by the time I'm done with those, Q1 is going to heat up even more.
People keep saying, "We want quality games for Wii!" but with rare exception, when those games do come out (like Little King's Story or Silent Hill), they can barely manage five-digit sales. I feel pretty comfortable saying that third-parties have squandered core mindshare on the Wii, and now few people there are really looking to the platform for releases. There may have been a hungry audience in 2007 or 2008, but by now, the "hardcore" herds have moved to greener pastures. The remaining market is pretty small.
Any third party who, at this stage, chooses to release a mythical full-budget big-team third-party Wii exclusive title would probably have found greater success on the HD platforms.
I think your analysis is on the mark when applied to certain third parties. As I understand your argument, developers are paid to do what they do because they express certain talents (like football stars are paid to play football because they have talents and skills that are useful in competing in professional football games). Game development, being a collaborative endeavor, makes the analogy fit better if we describe a given development studio as comparable to an entire football team, but otherwise your conclusions appear sound. Take a stellar development studio belonging to a small company: Valve, for instance (the studio and the company are nearly identical). They are clearly specialized at making first-person viewpoint games, chiefly shooters. They excel at it. Asking them to adapt to making games of another type with restrictions they aren't typically confined to may not be expected to work. Exactly as you say, forcing Valve to make a point-and-click adventure or a Bejewelled puzzler would be as sensible as forcing the Indianapolis Colts to play cricket.Opiate said:
However.
This logic cannot extend to the larger corporate third-party production houses: EA, Activision, Ubisoft, or Capcom. These are not game design studios. They are instead bands of men and women with very large quantities of investors' money at their disposal whose job it is to purchase pools of talent for the purpose of delivering gaming products to sell on the market. The pools of talent are studios, like Valve, who will each individually specialize in particular things. Take Electronic Arts. They make Madden and other sports games. However, it is not sensible to say that Electronic Arts, as a whole, specializes in sports games. They clearly are capable of making many other things, and they do. EA has studios that make nothing but sports games, and it would clearly be madness to ask the Madden teams to make The Sims or shooters or port Monopoly to the iPhone. Nevertheless, EA does accomplish all of these things by having multiple pools of talent each with specific capabilities: the Sims team, the FPS teams, the mobile gaming teams, and so forth.
When presented with a new design challenge a small studio like Valve has certain decisions to make, chiefly: can we make a new game of Type X without fundamentally altering our capabilities to make the games we're already successful at: Type A, Type B, Type C, and so forth? If the change is small or otherwise compatible with their current talent pool they may say "yes". Thus Valve made Portal, a non-shooter puzzle game with parkour elements. It's different from anything they made before, however it also shared obvious similarities with their other products: first-person perspective, similar controls, strong atmosphere with innovative storytelling methods, physics-based challenges, and so forth. It was a stretch for their capabilities but they were able to cope without radically altering the team's design sensibility. If presented with a completely different project- say, a 2D fighter- I would expect Valve would reject the project out of hand because the effort and time spent on developing the necessary tools and skills for building that kind of game is too burdensome compared to doing things with their existing skillset.
But when an Electronic Arts is presented with a new design challenge such as a new type of game they don't currently produce they have other options. They can re-purpose existing teams to the new game type, and they have the monetary resources to accomplish the necessary retooling and retraining. This may be a good idea for "pools of talent" whose specialties are no longer profitable- retraining the flight sim guys to make FPS, for instance. Or they can make new hires out of school and allow them to tackle a new design challenge, essentially building a new talent pool from scratch. Or they can follow the most obvious route and buy pre-packaged talent: buy smaller design studios.
All of these take some measure of investment but they obviously pay off. When the Guitar Hero phenomenon went nuclear with the gigantic sales of GH2, Electronic Arts and Activision didn't hesitate to make substantial investments to become competitive in the emerging market. EA partnered with MTV Games who had recently acquired the talent pool called Harmonix. Activision took the more direct route and purchased RedOctane and the Guitar Hero brand. I doubt anyone would suggest this was a bad move on the part of either corporation.
So now turning to the Wii: Where is the problem? I cannot accept that the difficulty is in finding pools of talent who can make compelling games for the system. These large corporations have solved many previous problems of emerging systems or genres through the judicious application of cash: besides the plastic instrument genre, obvious examples are in the bloom of games following big successes in the suspense horror genre, the console shooter genres (single and multiplayer), the GTA-style open world genre, the 2D and 3D fighter genres, the 2D and 3D platforming genres, and so forth. Are we truly willing to claim that breaking into the Wii- not even in specific genres, just in building a hit of any type- is more difficult than any of those accomplishments? The theory is outrageous.
I contend that the problem is not with the Wii but with the industry overall as it exists today. The big corporate publishers have become risk-adverse AND simultaneously risk blind. They do not want to invest money into a new venture unless the chance of success is high by their comprehension of the problem, and unless the amount of money to be invested is small. This results in self-fulfilling expectations of failure as they commit much smaller budgets to conquering portions of the vast Wii market compared to the vast resources they commit to cutting out a slice of the pie on the other consoles... despite the customers on the Wii side being under-served, the competition on the HD side fiercer, and the Wii pie being larger (worldwide) overall.
Nearly all the third-party wounds in their battle for the Wii are self-inflicted. They could have found success with reasonable investment either in new design teams or retooling old teams, giving them adequate budgets, and supporting them with first-rate marketing. Their failure to do that is nothing other than a disorder of corporate strategy.
sonicmj1 said:
Can you explain what you mean by further from your radar? Is that in reference to advertising, or general hype? For the record I also bought Demons Souls over Muramasa and a Boy and His Blob. Had a long, deep, well reviewed single player RPG come out on Wii against those others you listed I'd probably have bought it (though maybe not over DS).
Sho_Nuff82
Member
ShockingAlberto said:
For the sake of the current discussion (buyers of yearly or iterative sequels), it would generally be game consumer who pre-orders a game due to hype/demo/Game Informer cover/world of mouth/reviews, completes it as soon as possible, tosses it aside/sells it to Gamestop, and immediately demands more (in a month's time if it's SP, in 6-12 months if it has decent multi, longer if it has great multi and nothing comes out to take its place).
It is in this way that you get the "one month" hits that sell a million at full price and quickly fade. For some companies, this model works.
3rd parties would prefer all core consumers to be like the CoD fanbase. Or even, the Pokemon fanbase. Not only do they continue playing the games well into the new year, which allows for strong sales of add-on DLC in CoD's case, they STILL buy the iterative sequels (which to non-fans, look like minor upgrades) despite being content with the current offerings.
Why? Simply because it's more content, they have money to burn, they have time to waste. And they line up in droves to buy the next version as long as the game is fun to play.
BowieZ said:
No, that's too facile an analogy. It's not about the technology specs: it's about the philosophies the Wii espouses. One of those philosophies happens to be "Better technology does not make better games." Most major developers today have built their careers in no small part on their ability to produce striking graphics and visuals. A system which suggests that this skill is entirely or mostly useless essentially negates one of their most fundamental skills.
Again, using my analogy from before, a Football player (I'm talking about Soccer for Americans) needs agile, extremely coordinated feet. One might even call it the dominant characteristic of succesful Soccer players. If I make the switch to basketball, I wouldn't say that this skill is completely meaningless, but certainly it's profoundly less important. You need to rely far more on hand coordination, a skill which Soccer players would have little reason to cultivate.
Here's another example: consider Mario Kart. One of the primary complaints reviewers had about the game is that it is too luck based, that people in the back can get extremely potent power ups that rocket them to the front, without any real skill involved. They view this as a down side. However, I think it's very clear that most Mario Kart purchasers view this exact same quality as a good thing, because it facilitates playing together. People who stink can play with people who are great and still have some chance of winning. In other words, the precise qualities that "core" gamers and developers would dislike and avoid are qualities that many Wii gamers actively seek out. You can imagine the difficulty in reconciling such a dilemma.
So, the characteristics that make a good developer on the Wii are different (such as the high end grahpics example) and the qualities that make a good game are different on the Wii (such as Mario Kart's luck). This is like a very tall basketball player moving to Soccer: his innate physical characteristics are no longer advantageous -- in fact, it's probably better to be stout in Soccer -- and the extremely specific hand coordination skills he's spent decades developing are completely meaningless.
Leondexter said:
Can you provide some more info on this. Is this 'same average number of games' taking into account the larger Wii install base, meaning if the base for Wii is double that of the 360are they selling twice as many games? Also is there a breakdown of 3rd party vs 1st party? Wii owners(like myself) might be buying games true but its not going to do 3rd party developers much good or spur them into action if they are all 1st party Nintendo titles.
Cosmonaut X
Member
°°ToMmY°° said:
Under 50k, apparently. While obviously disappointing, consider the LTD sales of Silent Hill: Homecoming leaked earlier this year after around 3-4 months on the market:
360 - 73k
PS3 - 84k
gamergirly
Member
Although this is completely irrelevant and has a HIGH probability of not being released this year, I hope Zelda Wii sells like no tomorrow when it's released
jay said:
Probably general hype. I don't see and interact with a lot of advertising, and instead hear about most games through GAF. That is, for instance, how I heard lots of really striking impressions about Little King's Story before it came out in the US, and how I wound up preordering the game.
With the exception of Demon's Souls, I got all those games after their release date. One only needs to look as far as the Game of the Year awards on the top of these boards to see which set of titles received more recognition. So that's one example.
But I also feel like, in a way, I'm not really looking for games on the Wii. I mean, I had played New Super Mario Bros, and had very positive hands-on multiplayer impressions of the game. But I only own one Wiimote, because I don't use the Wii very much. I felt like I wouldn't have the opportunity to get as much out of that game as I'd like if I bought it, so I didn't. That is largely a consequence of how little I already use the console.
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Opiate said:
Well, yes. But to extend it a bit - most major developers today have built their careers in no small part on their ability to produce striking graphics and visuals on systems with no more graphical prowess than the Wii has.
The philosophy on the Wii is not that graphics power does not matter at all - it is that it doesn't matter so much that a massive jump in resolution - with all the polygons and shaders and processor power and things that go with it - is justified in the minds of the consumer who wants to play a game.
'Graphics don't matter' is a travesty of the Wii's philosophy as much as 'casuals don't buy games' is of the audience.
EDIT - putting it another way, it is not whether your graphics are better than your competitors, but whether they are good enough for the game, that counts.
ShinNL
Member
Opiate, I think it's slightly different. Just like during the PS2 era people weren't comparing the graphics with the Xbox or the PC, I think Wii gamers are easily wow'd if they get games with good graphics. Take a look at Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 for example. Those games probably look like it's easily done on the HD consoles with some shaders here and there. But because it's on the Wii, it's impressive. It's probably the same for the PSP and DS. People won't compare the games to stuff that's not on the same console.
The same programmers who push graphics can do it just as well on the Wii and see success in what they do.
I'm a flash programmer and when I push graphics (maximizing visual effects with minimal system requirements) for the web it's impressive for the client and customers of that client as well, because you get to see stuff you think it's not possible on that kind of platform.
The difference is probably this: you have to look at things as "does this look good?" and not "does this look like a 360/PS3 game"? You can't achieve anything good with the latter question, but the first question will take you very far on the Wii.
The same programmers who push graphics can do it just as well on the Wii and see success in what they do.
I'm a flash programmer and when I push graphics (maximizing visual effects with minimal system requirements) for the web it's impressive for the client and customers of that client as well, because you get to see stuff you think it's not possible on that kind of platform.
The difference is probably this: you have to look at things as "does this look good?" and not "does this look like a 360/PS3 game"? You can't achieve anything good with the latter question, but the first question will take you very far on the Wii.
Aaron Strife
Banned
Really? I'd go with 3 mil at the least. While Zelda isn't on Mario or Pokemon (or now, Wii ___) levels, it's still pretty damn huge.Kosma said:
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Sooo did we get Shattered Memories sales, and if not will we?
sonicmj1 said:
Thanks for the answer. I think it can be looked at two ways. The first way would suggest my idea of "build it and they will come" is incorrect - people have certain views of consoles by now and those views determine largely how they and how the overall community perceive a system's games .
I do think that can probably turned on its head, though. If you saw hype and praise for a dozen Wii games that looked interesting and not much for HD games your perspective may shift. Similarly, your feelings on the Wii have been partially shaped by the community you are a part of and if the feelings in the overall community shifted yours may as well. In theory, at least, games should be able to create such a shit.
The question is how malleable are people perceptions of systems.
ShockingAlberto
Member
I like Plants vs. Zombies.
The Faceless Master
Member
this seems to have some truth to it... these devs just aren't good at making wii games.Opiate said:
The Faceless Master
Member
and tea has wide appeal among both!mclem said:
Version 3.0
Member
Dorrin said:
I'd love to dig up the hard numbers for you, but I'm at work. Maybe someone else can. JoshuaJSlone did the analysis, based on total hardware and total software unit sales, which is data that's available from time to time. I believe it was in the NPD thread two months ago, if you'd like to look for it.
Yes, it takes into account the installed base. The stat is, if I remember correctly, that on average, every owner of a console is buying .01 games per month--so 1 game every ten weeks. It was astounding how close the numbers were between all 3 consoles, almost exactly the same number.
No, it didn't account for 1st party vs 3rd party. But honestly, that's a useless stat most of the time. Let say for a moment that 80% of the sales on the 360 were 3rd party games. But 90% of those sales were from Activision and EA. How is that any better for say, Konami or Atlus than 75% of Wii sales going to Nintendo? You're always going to have to deal with the big players, whether it's Nintendo or someone else. Activision and EA might not be used to getting overshadowed, but everyone else should be used to it.
Also, see my post earlier in reference to 3rd party performance on the Wii. They've earned their low numbers. I only feel sorry for the few teams who found success on the Wii and had it ruined by the flood of shit that drove people toward Nintendo's consistent quality.
The Faceless Master
Member
SPIRIT TRACKS!!!jvm said:
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS DS!!
SCRIBBLENAUTS!!!
Mario Kart DS!!! LEGS!!!
and oh snap is that a succesful 3rd party Wii game? from Ubisoft? :lol :lol :lol
oh wow hard time for thirdparties that banked on 360 and PS3.. even the Top20 doesnt look any better.. and :lol :lol @ sega and mario and sonic sales :lol :lol @ Ubisoft claiming Wii software doesnt sell.. yet their thrown together game (just dance) nearly sells as well as their prestige gamejvm said: