The Wii has gotten boxed around a bit lately by Capcom, with executives twice in the past couple weeks playing up their PS3 and Xbox 360 titles while de-emphasizing their Wii efforts after disappointment with Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbados' Treasure and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Blaming the platform for these failures, however, does not sit right with Bloober Team executive producer Marcin Kawa.
"With such a strong install base it's hard to believe that there's not enough people to appreciate mature, core content," said Kawa to Eurogamer. "It's all about games and quality. I'm not surprised that another shooter on rails doesn't sell well. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that people expect something more than that.”
"I bet No More Heroes 2 will do pretty good, as well as the new Metroid and Capcom's Monster Hunter. I hope that Last Flight will be successful and that's because we're making a game that was thought out as a Wii game,” he continued. “Instead of bitching, we'd rather create something that has value and doesn't feel like a third-rate port put together to make a quick buck."
Bloober is currently making Last Flight, an action horror title for the Wii. Significantly, this game is aimed squarely at mature audiences, whose buying habits on Wii seem to be capricious at best. "Was it the right decision to develop a game on Wii? Should we make it less violent? Are we gonna sell enough copies to pay our bills? You know, typical questions, nothing unusual here," Kawa said. "And while we love and respect Capcom and Pachter, we wouldn't go that far and say that mature stuff doesn't sell or that it's the platform holder's fault. Our logic is far simpler: if the game doesn't sell, we did something wrong."
While there have been some bad games among those Wii titles aimed at the core audience, the GameRankings scores of Dead Space: Extraction (83), MadWorld (82), The Conduit (72), Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (74), Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbados' Treasure (86) and House of the Dead: Overkill (80) were all relatively good and were developed exclusively for the Wii. On the other hand poorly received titles, like Deca Sports (53) and Game Party (22), both mini-game focused and better oriented to what is considered the Wii's prime demographic, sold well over a million copies apiece.
Clearly, game quality is not the lone determining factor in a Wii title (or any game's) sales success; the economics are also different between a smaller WiiWare developer like Bloober and a global, multi-platform publisher like Capcom, which is significant in their opinion differences.
2 Comments
January 15, 2010
Kawa's logic is too simple. Sometimes gamers don't buy games because it's not brand name like some people do clothes. Example: Wheelman looks like driver or driver mixed with GTA but the sales are terrible. Or a good game just won't sell because who the heck knows. Every excuse is 'on rails'. Now i'll be looking to see how well last fight sells and if it fails sales wise then we'll see what Kawa has to say. After Blooper puts a bunch of time, money and effort into making a game that they genuinely believe is good will his logic still be, "we did something wrong". I just don't see how that could 'always' be the case.
January 15, 2010
Of the examples I listed above, we have a good variety of titles, most of which were very well received with some from established franchises and others that are brand new. A couple even had extensive ad campaigns, but the sales result was disappointing ultimately. Kawa can probably afford to be more simplistic in his assessment since he's from a small indie developer, but large publicly traded companies (like Ubisoft, Sega, and Capcom) can compare between their various title sales and they've all come back with a negative verdict for the Wii.