Nintendo's success on the Wii in 2009 has been clearly evident, though the bigger picture comparison to all other titles on the system has been missing... until now. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has provided some insight on the overall picture of the Wii sales.
“Running through the NPD results for 2009 (U.S. only in retail dollars), it looks like Nintendo first party Wii titles sold 27.5 million units for a total of $1.53 billion at retail. In contrast, overall Wii software sales were 72.4 million units and $3.23 billion,” posted Pachter on NeoGAF [thanks Edge]. “Nintendo captured 38 percent of unit sales and 47 percent of dollar sales, leaving the rest for third parties. The average Nintendo first party Wii title sold for $55.63, while the average third party title sold for $37.85. Nintendo first party titles captured the top six positions, nine of the top 10, and 15 of the top 21.”
“I think that this illustrates an obvious point: Nintendo first party titles dominate on the Wii,” he added.
Pachter noted how Resident Evil The Darkside Chronicles and Dead Space Extraction finished at the disappointing positions of 151 and 261 and that the third-party titles in the top 20 include casual/family oriented products like EA Sports Active, Lego Star Wars, Deca Sports, Game Party and Rock Band 2. Guitar Hero World Tour apparently did the best among the games in that franchise, finishing at 30, which was behind titles like Just Dance, Cabela's Big Game Hunter, Deal or No Deal, The Biggest Loser and Jillian Michaels 2009.
“Recently, we've seen comments from third parties (Capcom, EA and Ubisoft) expressing frustration over an inability to generate big sales on the Wii,” wrote Pachter. “The conclusion I draw from this is that the Wii audience is far more casual and harder to reach than the PS3 or 360 audiences (pretty obvious), and they buy brand name software (with 'Wii' or 'Mario' in the title, or with a TV/product tie-in). The only titles that don't fit this are Deca Sports and Game Party. The average selling price of third party titles says a lot, coming in almost $7 below the average for all Wii titles, and almost $18 below first party titles. There were a lot of units sold with the word 'party' in the title at $20 or less.”
“I made a comment on Bonus Round that half the Wii audience is hard core and half is purely casual. That split sounds pretty aggressive, and the data above suggests it's more like 25/75,” he concluded.
