Has the Wii Shot it’s Load?
Author: Vince | Date: July 24, 2008
It has been almost 2 years since Nintendo revolutionised the publics perception of gaming by releasing the Wii, the family freindly console with games even your granny could play. In those 2 years Nintendo has delivered a new installment for just about every single one of its heavy hitting franchises, Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, Metroid, Smash Brothers, Warioware and more all coupled up with Nintendo’s habit of only releasing one game in these series per generation. Add to this that they have released a mountain of the all-time classic Nintendo, Sega and SNK games on Virtual Console and the question is, where do they go from here?
Nintendo’s VP of sales and marketing, Cammy Dunaway, recently said in an interview with Wired.com that:
Absolutely the hard-core gamer crowd is critically important to us.
But are these hardcore gamers supposed to be satisfied with Super Mario Sluggers, WiiMusic or Animal Crossing this winter? Their E3 showing was lackluster at best, with very little to whet the appetite of most fans, just more gimmicky games, the ‘Wiispeak‘ and the ‘Motion Plus‘, hardly groundbreaking. I think that by trying to keep the image of the casual console at bay Nintendo has left itself low on titles to satisfy the hardcore gamers who purchased the Wii in the first place, and with the non-gamer market that Nintendo captured with the Wii, as soon as the next big ‘must have’ gadget comes out the popularity of the Wii will begin to wane.
What can Nintendo do to stop the rot? Well, unless there is a new Starfox, Donkey Kong or real Mario just around the corner, the big N will have to try and get more 3rd party dev’s on board to make some excellent Wii only titles like Capcom’s upcoming Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop or Lucasarts long awaited Star Wars game. If this doesn’t happen then the only games the Wii will have that appeal to the ‘hardcore’ crowd will be cross platform titles that usually have the motion controls thrown in as an afterthought, and should that become reality then expect a mass exodus in 2009 as the Wii owners who don’t fall into the ‘casual’ crowd move on to one of the other two ‘next-gen’ consoles to get their fix.
Of course I could be horribly wrong and the Wii could go on to continue dominating the video game market through 2009, releasing another endless string of peripherals and mini-game compilations for the masses to digest. Dropping the occasional gem in there to keep the fans happy, but something deep inside stops me from thinking that will be the case.
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Not really, no. It has the hype of a Tivo, but cheaper, works in a social setting and is family friendly without actually having dumbed down gameplay in many first party / some third party titles. The PS2 sold 142.5 million units, whereas the gamecube sold 21 million. The Wii has already blasted through 21 million. Why would Nintendo care about the hardcore gamer when there’s a casual gamer market lapping this system up? And why does any hardcore gaming site take anyone in Nintendo seriously when they say ‘we care about the hardcore gamer’? What else are they going to say, ‘no, of course not’? Not only does the Wii have a casual air, its components less powerful than its competitors, meaning less glory and fewer accolades for developers. No one is raving about the technical feat that is Super Mario Galaxy – they’re marveling over GTA4 and MGS4. No, the Wii hasn’t ‘shot its load’. It exploited a market and is raking in barrel fulls of money in the process. And when that wanes, the Wii2 will come out. Anything and everything that tries to compete will get crushed, and will just be an ‘also ran’; see: Sony PSP vs. Nintendo DS.
An interesting post, and as a non-Wii owner (as it doesn’t have enough games that appeal to me as a typical “hardcore gamer”), you’d think that I’d agree with you. But I don’t – in fact, I’m starting to think that the Wii will be around for a long time to come.
That said, I do have to agree that Nintendo must be lying through their teeth when they claim to be committed to the hardcore gaming market. They’d be stupid to aim for that market, in fact, because then they’d be competing with Microsoft, Sony, and PC games, and they wouldn’t stand a chance with their less powerful console – after all, power is everything in the hardcore market.
On the subject of PC gaming – I read somewhere that casual games are in fact the most popular form of gaming in the world at the moment – in the form of desktop games like Solitaire and Minesweeper, and of course web-based Flash games. So there’s still a huge casual games market out there that Nintendo can keep pushing consoles to.