From a simple glance at the monthly NPD numbers, Nintendo’s Wii would seem to be kicking some serious butt — but the New York Times begs to differ. While the Wii’s cultural phenomenon may have moved hardware off store shelves and into consumers’ living rooms, the same cannot be said for the Wii’s growing stable of software titles.
Readers might be quick to point to the March success of Super Smash Bros. Brawl — after all, the Wii title did sell a record-breaking 2.7 million copies. But to whom? Apparently, hardcore gamers:
[...]sales dropped more than 90 percent over the first four weeks, according to estimates from VG Chartz, a team of analysts who study video-game sales.
Some major retail chains — including Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us — have already begun bundling the Smash Bros. game with Wii machines for sales online, a sign that the base of hard-core gamers who went looking for the game has been depleted.
Retailers confirm the sharp drop. “We sold a couple thousand copies in the first week,” said Xavier Pervez, assistant manager at a GameStop in Fairfield, Conn. “It’s dropped off significantly now, maybe 100 in each of the last couple weeks.”
The NY Times argues that the new, mainstream audience the Wii has hooked just doesn’t buy games the same way the hardcore audience does. Instead of eagerly anticipating every new release, they’re more likely to be satisfied with their Wii Sports, and for 58% of Wii owners, a copy of Wii Play — the game whose sales are attributed primarily to the fact that it comes with an extra controller.
Epic CEO Mark Rein sees things differently. In an interview with IGN, he related that Wii owners don’t even play what they have already purchased, and described the Wii as “kind of like a weird virus”:
It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, “Oh my God that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it.” So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on.
Meanwhile, interviewees for the NY Times article attributed the Wii’s low attach rate partially to a lack of appropriate advertising, echoing what we’d heard at an marketing panel at MI6 earlier this month:
“Advertising on GameInformer and 1up.com just isn’t reaching this audience,” Mr. Pachter [Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities] said. “When you make a game like Zack & Wiki or Boogie, which turns the hard core off and doesn’t reach the masses, then you’re in trouble.”
“The kind of person that buys a Wii is not the same kind of person that buys a PS3 or an Xbox,” said John Greiner, the chief executive of Hudson Entertainment, the North American arm of Hudson Soft. “You have to be very specific when you design a game and target not only the gameplay mechanics for that user, but also the marketing for that kind of a product launch.”
While we share the NY Times‘ concerns, GameCyte wonders if the Wii will be a two-trick pony much longer. With the addition of accessible titles like Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit over the next two months, we expect the Wii will come into its own — soon maturing into a full-grown, four-trick pony instead.
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