Feature: A Wii Hiccup in the Family Business

Does anyone really know who makes up the market for the Wii? Nintendo’s albino bookend has been spotted in pubs and bars, and student digs, in family homes and down the gym. There are games for mums and dads and OAPs, young girls and boys and surly teens.

But this has created a bit of an issue for third-party developers not privy to Nintendo’s secret recipe. A blip in the sales department and everyone has started panicking, with the worrying flock led by Capcom who swiftly saw in the New Year by poring over their Wii sales figures and crying. Only a few days into 2010, Capcom France’s General Director, Antoine Seux, made waves by suggesting to French site Gamekult that Capcom’s future ‘was on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360’, although this was swiftly dealt with by the company’s PR department.

But he wasn’t the only one. Dripping diplomacy, even Senior Director of Communications Chris Kramer, talking to Gamasutra, came out with a now much publicised quote where he suggested that “if you're not Nintendo, it does seem harder to make money on the Wii today compared to the PS3 and the Xbox 360. It's a very tough market to crack and is ever-shifting.”

Is this true? Is it fair? Is it just a case of Capcom bemoaning their critically acclaimed but atrociously marketed commercial failures or do they have a point? And what does this mean for the Wii in 2010?

Unsurprisingly, a good deal of the commercial flops on the Wii have been ‘mature’ games, titles designed to shrug off words like ‘family’, ‘casual’ and ‘kids’ and prove that the little white box can in fact be a console for hardcore gamers too. Seux cited low sales of Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles to back up his claim that the Wii, although important, was a family console. It is a case that seems to have some weight as disappointing sales for other developers’ titles such as SEGA’s MadWorld and EA’s Dead Space: Extraction might testify.



The Wii is seen as a safe, unthreatening and quirky device. The recent swathe of Ant and Dec adverts help to hammer home this image - the two ex-Byker Grove Z-listers are the cheeky chappies of Saturday night TV: fun, friendly, perhaps a hint of naughtiness, but they’d never use rude words, offend anyone or hack people to pieces with a monochrome chainsaw. They’re using Nintendo’s own games, and they’re EVERYWHERE!

But this is both a blessing and a curse: it has opened up the possibilities of gaming to a much wider audience, but it is a gaming audience made up of predominantly self-professed non-gamers who ‘don’t usually go in for this sort of thing’. The cultural acceptance of the Wii into so many homes seems to have been on the basis of family-friendly marketing. It would certainly explain the MadWorld controversy when the National Institute on Media and the Family went nuts once again, saying:



“In the past, the Wii has successfully sold itself as being the gaming console for the entire family and a way to bring family-game nights back into people's living rooms. Unfortunately, Nintendo opened its doors to the violent videogame genre. The National Institute on Media and the Family hopes that Nintendo does not lose sight of its initial audience and continues to offer quality, family-friendly games.” Normally I’d ignore such polemical sermonising. This is, after all, the same organisation who famously accused the videogame industry in 2005 of promoting cannibalism because of the Xbox game Stubbs the Zombie, but they might actually have a point this time around.

The change that the Wii has brought in terms of introducing gaming to a wider section of society has been jumped upon by developers. But bombarding the market with a thousand different games and seeing which ones stick is not the answer. The Wii’s library is stuffed full of shovelware, games that have been churned out to leap on the tail coats of trends predominantly set by Nintendo’s own in-house development teams - sports games and mini-game oriented party titles - or hastily cobbled together games designed to appeal to this new audience by simulating cheerleading or dog walking.



It’s no wonder Nintendo do so well when they release one of their own: they advertise extensively, they only drop them once or twice a year, and they only release games that are the best in their respective genres �" games that you won’t, and can’t, find anywhere else, until the inevitable swathe of haphazard clones appears of course. Why would you need a hundred other party games when you already own WarioWare?



But other parties seem to have failed to realise this. Self-styled mature games for the ‘hardcore’ crowd are doomed to fail, along with ports for already established franchises. Why, for example, buy Dead Space: Extraction if you already have the original for your PS3 or X360? Why play an on-rails shooter like Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles when 1. You already own Umbrella Chronicles, 2. You can play Resident Evil 5 on your PS3 or X360, and 3. The oh-so-limited genre died out over a decade ago?

It’s easy to recount the killer apps for the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the exclusives that inevitably form the basis for leet-spewing flame wars. But they share a few too - must-have games that you’ll only find on the high-end consoles. It’s time third party developers started treating the Wii with a bit of respect. There seems to be a large degree of development fear. Nearly every port that makes it onto the Wii seems destined to have mediocre graphics dumbed down from their shinier siblings and a half-hearted attempt to adapt the control system for the Wiimote that make it arguably the worst platform on which to experience that particular game.



The real shame is that there are some stellar third party games for the Wii out there, but they’re just not getting the attention they deserve because they’re hidden in amongst a forest of mediocrity, with publishers unsure and hesitant when it comes to promotion. Games like Little King’s Story and Capcom’s own Zack and Wiki were both excellent, but sold poorly, a trend as much down to marketing inaction on the part of industry producers as anything else.

Thankfully, Kramer’s conclusion to all of this is to scale back, release fewer titles, and concentrate on big ‘event’ games. Perhaps with more time, care and consideration, the developers can concentrate on creating something that’s going to last, with a marketing budget to make sure that it stands out because that’s what the Wii needs: noticeable killer apps. And don’t tell me that mature games can’t work on the Wii... stop focusing on the controversy of it all and make a decent game. Just look at what Nintendo have done with Metroid or the success of Resident Evil 4.

Matt Gardner
Editorial Assistant
www.dealspwn.com