Is Mature Gaming On The Wii Dead? Simply Put, It’s Getting There

Not to say “I told you so”, but we’ve been predicting this for months ever since the Wii first launched. The console just simply isn’t for everyone and everything. When Nintendo first announced the Wii, everyone discussed the downsides to the innovative and revolutionary change to their gaming model, and we all gave a big nod to the upsides, as well. The fact of the matter is: gaming on the Wii is for everyone. That doesn’t sound bad on paper, but if you take a deeper peek into the rabbit hole, you’ll find that “everyone” means a lot more than it really does. “Everyone” means all the children, all of the moms who want to protect their children, all of the elderly who doesn’t seem to take well to modern culture and vulgar images.

This leaves out a very important group, the hardcore. I’m not going to spend any time defining what’s hardcore and what isn’t (as that’s been done far too often), but to dispel this very important group in the gaming pyramid isn’t in the best interest of any game developer. Case in point? Infinity Ward with their Call of Duty series. Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto. Microsoft with Halo, and so on and so forth. The sales generated by these titles are just entirely too great to be ignored. Casual gaming is the future of getting “everyone” to play video games, but hardcore gaming still gets 1/2 of its name from a very important defining factor: core.

It’s your core gaming audience that keeps the console afloat. We praise Nintendo for great sales and ground breaking innovation with their Wii and DS, and rightfully so: they’ve learned how to market to be successful, while still being original and niche in their offering. I’m not going to take away from the great titles they’ve offered this generation – I had a great deal of fun with games like Scribblenauts, New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart, and others. Nintendo also enjoys a nice profit of sales from these titles, too, with their games often gracing top 10 sales lists for months at a time. For third party, though, it’s looking very grim for Nintendo’s future.

We can play the finger pointing game as to who’s to blame for that: Nintendo for not pushing their third party enough, or the third party not putting enough effort into creating mesmerising and impression-lasting games for the console. We won’t, though, because we don’t know the full story. What we can look at, though, are third party game sales. They certainly don’t lie, as numbers are publicly paraded around each month as to what game’s are being deemed successful, and they tell us that Nintendo can’t offer third party publishers much return on Wii titles: the market is simply over saturated.

A lot of people don’t see it, but the bulk of the reason why we have so much shovelware on the Wii comes from the fact that putting too much development time into a game, only for it to produce undesirable sales, is, at the simplest level, a loss and a waste. Gaming, just like any business, is just as much about sales, numbers, and business as any other industry (including other arts). When developers want to make these elaborate and triple A quality titles, they instead take a look back at similar titles or their past titles numbers and get discouraged. The flow of the thought process is simple.

1. We want to make a game.
2. Is the idea already out there?
3. If it is, how did it fare with critical reaction?
4. Now, how did it fare with sales?

This can then be branched off into different scenarios. Generally favorable outlooks = the development process begins (sometimes). The problem is that, often more than not is the case with the Wii, the scenario is unfavorable. Developers then come up with a cheap, cost-effective IP or idea that is easy to deploy and any losses on the product are easily forgotten (while, conversely, any gains on the product are thoroughly enjoyed) because not much went into development in the first place. Win/Win situation. With risk comes reward, but it is and always will remain a double-edged sword. When that risk becomes costly, it’s what makes people begin to back off.

Such is the exact case recently with Sega. On the latest 4 Guys podcast from 1UP, Constantine Hantzopoulos of Sega of America expressed these exact sentiments:

“Are we going to do more mature titles for the Wii? Probably not,”

“I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it. It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s no mature games on the Wii. Is there an audience out there?’ We did some research, it said there was an audience out there.”

They did some research and it said there was an audience out there. Numbers can be misleading when you have millions upon millions of devices floating out there, but then you have to consider what the numbers mean. Are people scooping these machines up just to have them because it was a hot item at one point? Are a bulk of the populace owning the console really just children, parents, and the elderly looking for a family fun affair here and there? I’m sure a bunch of the hardcore own the machine, but are they really going to really pay it any attention when they’ve got heavy hitters coming left and right for competing platforms?

They aren’t alone, either. Just yesterday, Capcom’s Antoine Seux, speaking with Gamekult (with translation of the important bits courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz), offered similar disgust in their sales of Resident Evil games on the Wii, and “core” titles overall.

“With an increase in the amount of games available, he continued, the past year saw many core titles such as MadWorld, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop and The House of the Dead: Overkill fail to make significant impact.

Conversely, games such as Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and New Super Mario Bros Wii “work great.”

Of course, it’s Mario.

The dilemma is clear, then. Sega sees it, Capcom is in the same boat, and I’m sure other developers are beginning to see it or already have, and while the Wii itself is nowhere near dead, we can at least begin to see how one dimensional it truly is.