Another day
Another hundred video game forums retread the same six questions about the Wii. We occasionally engage in a handful of forums until we realise why we stopped the last time. The flavour of the last five years on console forums is to discuss the death of the Wii. The death of third party support. The death of core gaming. The death of non HD gaming. Over and over again. The same arguments backed up with time honoured gut feeling and rhetoric. This heroic poster over at neogaf, Hunahan writes what I would were I not making dick jokes or getting angry at the dumbness of the gaming community.
Well said sir. I'd pretend not to be some kind of Nintendo fanboy but you'd never buy it. What I don't get is why when gamers get together on web forums they all turn into industry analysts albeit, without any kind of data or statistics to base their poorly formed opinion. The odd meaningless sound bite from angry people at Capcom who can't understand why their poorly marketed latest re-re-port of an old game that's on shop shelves for two weeks doesn't sell 10 million. Here's why it doesn't sell 10 million Capcom. Average, normal people, people unlike you and me who read about games, participate in games forums and read games magazines just don't have the time and the inclination to endlessly research what games are worth buying and which ones aren't. So what if you are making shitty games? it shouldn't stop you from selling them. Look at Hollywood. Hollywood has been successfully marketing the shittiest films of all time over the last five years. Smother people in adverts that make the film look exciting, challenging and worth £9 at the cinema and they don't care if it didn't quite live up to expectations. By contrast paying for one TV spot at 11pm at night making your game look like a 1990s American action film won't particularly have them come running to part with £40 for your game. Alternatively, you could, you know, make a decent fucking game once in a while. One that isn't broken or racist or adolescent or a fucking sequel or actually challenges players and becomes a must have piece of human work. It's boring. Boring and tiring and negative all the time. Of course, I don't have to go those forums but sometimes I get lonely. So lonely.
What? There's tons of third party support. At almost every given moment of this generation, there has been more third party games for Wii than for any other system on the market.
Let's just cut to the real question. What you're really asking is why the Wii doesn't have the next big installments of Resident Evil, GTA, JRPG XIII, Platinum Games Presents, Castlevania Of War, or whatever the hell else it is that's igniting the latest raging message-board megathreads, pixel-counting screenshot wars, and fawning, five-star video reviews.
Thing is, by the time you can sit through a thirty minute cutscene about a gender-bending ninja cyborg limping around to save a mustached, one-eyed super-soldier, you probably also cut pretty deep into the same demographic that spends large quantities of cash on electronic entertainment, buys way more HDMI cables than the per-capita average, and scorns the suggestion of physical exercise encroaching upon their grossly disproportionate interest in recreational software.
What I'm driving at is that if you were to create a ven diagram that mapped out the type of people who are actually interested in the specific types of product that are absent, I'd be willing to bet that you'd find a nearly perfect and complete overlap with the type of people who are interested in better graphics, HDTVs, realistic physics, and online play.
Nintendo's biggest success was identifying that the presumed critical mass of spaceship fantasizing, underboob-ogling, IGN-reading geeks were actually a fractional niche.
It seems pretty clear that this niche is now struggling to catch up with a moment of self-realization.
Hate it, bite it, fight it.....the answer is still, quite simply, that despite the Wii's resounding success, it has not managed, on any level, to corner the increasingly irrelevant traditional market that continually slaps $60 across all of those sweat-smeared Gamestop counters to buy this type of nerdy crap. Those folks run with a different crew.
And without them, you really can't sell Street Fighter.
Oh, I know. You, or I, or Steve, or poster #213, or whichever petition-posting collection of 2,000 people all have Wii's and we like them, and we'd buy 3rd party hardcore games, and blah blah blah whatever.
When it comes to gaming the 'core gamer-market game, the Wii is basically stuck playing the Spock goatee-wearing, inverse-world version of Kinect.
A day late and a dollar short. Just the way it is.
Well said sir. I'd pretend not to be some kind of Nintendo fanboy but you'd never buy it. What I don't get is why when gamers get together on web forums they all turn into industry analysts albeit, without any kind of data or statistics to base their poorly formed opinion. The odd meaningless sound bite from angry people at Capcom who can't understand why their poorly marketed latest re-re-port of an old game that's on shop shelves for two weeks doesn't sell 10 million. Here's why it doesn't sell 10 million Capcom. Average, normal people, people unlike you and me who read about games, participate in games forums and read games magazines just don't have the time and the inclination to endlessly research what games are worth buying and which ones aren't. So what if you are making shitty games? it shouldn't stop you from selling them. Look at Hollywood. Hollywood has been successfully marketing the shittiest films of all time over the last five years. Smother people in adverts that make the film look exciting, challenging and worth £9 at the cinema and they don't care if it didn't quite live up to expectations. By contrast paying for one TV spot at 11pm at night making your game look like a 1990s American action film won't particularly have them come running to part with £40 for your game. Alternatively, you could, you know, make a decent fucking game once in a while. One that isn't broken or racist or adolescent or a fucking sequel or actually challenges players and becomes a must have piece of human work. It's boring. Boring and tiring and negative all the time. Of course, I don't have to go those forums but sometimes I get lonely. So lonely.
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