After Microsoft revealed its impressive, Wii-challenging Project Natal at last July's Electronics Entertainment Expo, I turned to IGN's Nintendo Editor-in-Chief Matt Cassamassina and asked "How's Nintendo going to respond to that?" He just shook his head.
Couldn't blame him, really. I'm the guy who's been known to lead off a column by typing "the Wii is a fad" several times in a row. Not because I personally believe it, but because it's fun to watch Nintendaddicts get Hulk-mad (complete with humorous color changes) and the very notion raises interesting questions. Questions Nintendo's asked itself ever since their little white wonder took off strong in 2006. Wiimotion conquered the world on a solid wave of casual consumers playing casual games in casual ways, and it captured a chunk of the zeitgeist in the process... three years ago.
Meanwhile, Nintendo's faithful core of gaming customers almost fell by the wayside, grossly under-served in comparison to the casual crowd. And while WiiMotion Plus recently tightened up the controls to a more gamer-oriented level, the only thing that's truly changed in three years is that Wiis are now readily in stock at Babies R Us, a.k.a. the pastel circle of hell. That's just depressing. The Wii is common. The shine is off. Natal is the new hotness.
Good thing Nintendo's already reinventing the Wii as a hardcore gaming platform. It's the smartest move it could possibly make.
Less than a day after Microsoft premiered Natal, Nintendo announced a lineup that read like a love letter to its diehard fans. A new Legend of Zelda. New Super Mario Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2, marking the first time two 3D Mario games will share space on the same console. Metroid: Other M by Team Ninja, the guys who heaped on the pain for gamer-murdering favorite Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox. Doesn't get more hardcore than that. But this isn't a response to Natal. This is a response to Nintendo's own dual (and dueling) market needs, and it's long overdue.
The Wii's always been a borderline schizophrenic. You really can't understate what Nintendo's accomplished with its hail Mary pass, coming off the GameCube's distant third showing, but you also can't ignore that it currently runs a distant second to Microsoft's Xbox 360 when it comes to annual profits.
N-fans love to shout Wii sales numbers (52.3 million units at this writing) and its total market domination (almost half of all consoles sold is a Wii) and call it good. It is good... it's just not good enough. The real money's made in software, and that's where the Big N's had a ton of trouble reconciling two distinct classes of consumer: casual players and hardcore gamers.
I'll sum up Nintendo's monster hits in five words: Wii Play and Wii Fit. Wii Play is three years old and, until recently, moved a minimum quarter-million units every month. That's some legs, friend. About 700,000 Wii Fits sell monthly, a year post-release. Almost half of all Wii owners bought those two games... and few others. Nintendo's big quandary for the last three years has been how to get casual players to buy more games, preferably before those Wiis end up in the back of a closet. Unfortunately, part of what makes a casual player casual is that they don't play a lot of games .
Of course, Nintendo's real goal is to make crossover hits that appeal to casual and hardcore camps simultaneously, but that's awfully tough to pull off. Nintendo's done it exactly once with Mario Kart Wii, which benefited from having "Wii" in the title and a marketing push that never mentioned Mario... a character more famous world-wide than Mickey Mouse. Every commercial was Cowboy Jed screaming "Get behind the wheel!" in a manner so annoying it practically qualified as a plea for death.
Nintendo expects a similar buy-in for New Super Mario Wii, but I've played it, and that's not going to happen. There's no pretending this one's just a happy Wii racing game. It's not for the Wii Fit crowd. It's a Mario platformer.
Dig past the WiiGame-branded titles to the hardcore fare that hardcore gamers crave, and you find Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy made just over a third what Play and Fit each raked in and just over half Mario Kart's numbers. Nothing else comes close. Unlike Play, Fit and Mario Kart, Brawl and Galaxy aren't even in the top fifty monthly sellers anymore. They'll have to settle for being smash hits in the 8 million units sold range, as opposed to Play and Fit's mid/low 20 millions and Mario Kart's 15.5 million.
So what knocked Wii Play down to 50K-a-month last June? More casual titles, specifically EA Active and Wii Sports Resort. The good news is we can officially toast the "fad" theory; casual players don't buy a lot of games, but they all buy the one or two titles that do interest them year to year. The bad news is hardcore gamers, who'd cheerfully snap up a dozen games a year in lesser but still impressive numbers, aren't seeing the games they want.
My personal Xbox/Wii game ratio stands at about 4 to 1. Months can drop away between worthy hardcore titles, while a mountain of cheap, poorly-selling, third party mini-game garbage floods store shelves, grabbing at Wii Play's success like a used car salesman stalking Donald Trump.
Least you think I'm simply moving the goal posts so I can gloat over Nintendo's failure, since I so clearly have it in for them, I refer you to a recent study by Nielsen, the same guys who track television ratings. In the last six months, far fewer people have actively gamed on a Wii than any other console. More people are gaming on a PlayStation 2. Hell, more people are gaming on a GameCube. But those who do fire up their Wii spend more time on it than PlayStation 3 owners spend in PS3land. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata saw this problem coming back in 2008.
"Even if it is revolutionary, people will become tired of a new form of entertainment. This happens faster when others try to reproduce the initial change. Then what seemed fresh inevitably will be lost. For all of us in the video game industry, there is danger in standing still," Iwata-san said.
Clearly, a chunk of Wii people go deep with what games they have and enjoy them perfectly fine, but the majority have strayed. Their games are on another console. If more traditional Nintendo games were available on the Wii, they'd buy 'em. That's why they bought a Wii. And Nintendo seems to have finally remembered that. They're diversifying back into the market they started from, putting real muscle into creating games for the people who've been in their corner all along.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo's not giving up those casual dollars. It just isn't working as hard for them anymore... primarily because there's no need. Wii Sports Resort and a Wii Fit sequel will do the heavy lifting for the next year or so while the rest of us can look forward to a whole slew of Wii games that won't bring eternal shame to our family should we play them.
Sharply skewing the casual/hardcore ratio serves Nintendo as well as us. They can release two more casual mega-hits for that half of their install base, then jauntily throw out a half-dozen Super Mario Galaxy-sized smash hits (such as Super Mario Galaxy 2) for the gamer population, and suddenly the Wii actually starts performing like the all-knowing, all-devouring gaming platform it's advertised to be.
At least, that's the theory.
A few developers stepped up to fill the hardcore void Nintendo left, and the results have been shaky to say the least. Capcom's done well porting its popular Resident Evil series to the Wii, but tanked badly doing the same to zombie apocalypser Dead Rising. Sega's bombed three times in a row with Madworld, House of the Dead: Overkill, and The Conduit.
All these games put together wouldn't match the sales figures of Wii Music, which (at 2.6 million sold) is the comparative "failure" of the Wii Game imprint. No lie, some of them are well deserving of their abysmal fate, but Madworld and Conduit are good games that could have and should have done better.
Part of me wants to put it down to N-fans being hard-wired to instinctively distrust third party software - not without precedent - but mostly I think the Nintendo faithful didn't buy a Wii to play Halo. A true Nintendo game has its own vibe... I hesitate to call it chaste, but they're generally not as gory, cynical or in-your-face as what you find on an Xbox or PlayStation.
There's a certain atmosphere, whether it's crushing dread or selfless heroism or lighthearted whimsy, that's missed when absent. That might be tough to contemplate for somebody who equates challenge with blood spatter, but developers must tap into it to really succeed on the Wii.
Retro Studios did (under heavy influence from the Nintendo home office) when they translated Metroid into Metroid Prime, one of the GameCube's top sellers. I'm not so sure Wii-bound rail shooters Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles and Dead Space: Extraction will follow suit. Hopefully, I'm wrong, but I'm also not so sure anybody's really interested in rail shooters at all, outside of an arcade.
High Voltage Software, the developer behind The Conduit, has bravely dedicated itself 100% to hardcoring on the Wii. I find that entirely laudable, but its next project is Grinder, which the High Voltage guys freely admit is Left 4 Dead for the Wii. Except I don't play Left 4 Dead on the Wii. I play it on the Xbox 360. I'd rather High Voltage make Grinder for the Wii its own game with its own personality on its own platform. It's a mistake to shoehorn a PlayStation or Xbox game into the Wii. The bigger consoles do them too well.
For a perfect example of third party, Wii-specific hardcore, I'd point to Ubisoft's incoming Red Steel 2. It's a Wiimotion Plus first-person swordfighter, something that just wouldn't work as well on any other console. More to the point, it exploits the Wii's strengths while staying within its limits. The gameplay's tight, the graphics flashy, the combat satisfying and viscera-free. Is it going to look as amazing as an A-list PlayStation 3 game? No, but it doesn't have to. I like eye-popping graphics, but I'll take brain-popping gameplay first. I don't need Pac-Man in HD.
And while we're on the subject, any snob who dismisses the Wii as "a toy" should re-evaluate their need for playing games. Here's a history lesson: GoldenEye 007 reinvented first person shooters for consoles on the Nintendo 64. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem evolved survival horror on the GameCube. The original Ninja Gaiden trilogy, which didn't coddle you like the newer versions, lived on the NES. Once upon a time, Nintendo was the hardcore, and while it won't overtake the competition in that respect, it can easily carve out its own niche in the badlands.
I like that Nintendo tries to straddle the line on occasion, but the Wii can support two separate-but-equal customer streams. Now, finally, it will. Nintendo is leading with all its big guns, and there are plenty more franchises to follow up. Expect Kirby to get a Wii game at some point. Cassamassina insists Kid Icarus Wii is still a go, despite the recent implosion of its developer. Deep in the heart of Texas, Retro Studios is up to something and Sega isn't giving up yet, either. Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Capcom are all looking to tap the Wii's biggest untapped market. More is coming. A lot more.
Casual games for casual gamers. Serious games for serious gamers. It's our turn now
) aber das kommt alles sehr spät und wie ich denke ZU spät. aber man hat ja bekanntlich schon pferde kotzen sehen.
