Topic: Icon Games Reveals WiiWare Sales Numbers

[NWR_pap64]

Family Games proves to be their biggest hit on the service.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/28852

Icon Games has released sales numbers of some of their WiiWare game releases.

Their most successful title is Family Games with an estimated 14,439 downloads. Coming in second is Stunt Cars with 12,577 downloads. In third place is Arcade Sports with 11,282 downloads. Finally, Soccer Bashi netted 2,515 downloads since its release. In total, Icon Games totaled 40,810 downloads through the WiiWare service.

In comparison to their PlayStation Portable results, though, the numbers are small. Their highest selling PSP game, Bashi Blocks, has reached 83,595 downloads. The company previous railed against Nintendo's WiiWare performance thresholds and lack of flexibility and poor critical reception of those games.

[StrawHousePig]

Who games? No offense, but that's my first and only reaction. Then again I couldn't name off the top of my head the Bit.Trip guys either...

[Chocobo_Rider]

That whole threshold thing is designed to prevent developers from putting out shovelware and capitalizing on the few people stupid enough to buy it.  If you try to play that way, you won't see a dime.

If you try to make a game that tens of thousands of people will actually want to play? Congratulations.  You just rode Nintendo's popularity to financial success!

"Stunt Cars" and "Arcade Sports" and "Family Games" aren't going to cut it.

And then they complain that their bad reviews were only because they "veer[ed] too far from the typical Nintendo styling".  Give me a f***ing break.  Just shut down so someone else can have the digital space.

[NWR_pap64]

I'm sorry, but even when you have very deep, highly acclaimed titles on the service there is still a major issue of developers hitting the threshold, even with lots of advertising muscle behind it. Nintendo simply doesn't care about the downloads aspect since it doesn't generate as much attention as their retail efforts.


The only way to get some really fantastic games out on WiiWare is if developers have enough of a big budget to work with something unique, and even then there are so many limitations, from size to what they can do on the hardware. And if the game manages to be too ambitious, there's the matter of money. Games cost money to make, and the better the game is, the more money is going to require. Nintendo doesn't really care for WiiWare. At times they will pretend like they do and eventually throw a bone here and there for SOME choice developers (the BIT.TRIP guys), but ignore the rest.


This means that the game, even with all its critical acclaim, still has to try and sell it to the audience, an audience that consists of casual gamers that have no idea how the Internet on the Wii works and another part of the audience that cares primarily for Nintendo's first party efforts. No advertisement, no support, no downloads.


You can say "but X game was popular!". Well, they got lucky. WiiWare had issues from the start, from memory being an issue to how Nintendo treated the games it received. The problem isn't the quality but the platform it is on.


Remember how we were supposed to get Super Meat Boy as a WiiWare exclusive, and the bigger it got the more limitations it experienced? That has been hailed as one of the best downloadable games ever, and it was supposed to be for WiiWare. But what happened? The system happened. So fanboys can claim that third party developers just needed to make "better games", but when the service is as clumsy as it is, you could make the Skyward Sword of WiiWare games and people wouldn't notice, and if they did it would be a very small number.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Somebody should get Iwata a Steam account.

I haven't played a game on there in a while, but they just make buying and collecting the games so much fun.

[Monteblanco]

Nintendo Life additionally reports that, according to Icon's Richard Hill-Whittall, Bashi Blocks' numbers are inflated as the game was, for a limited time, offered for free to PSN Plus subscribers. Considering this, any comparison between platforms is pointless.

[StrawHousePig]

It's a poor musician who blames his instrument.

[ejamer]

There are two issues here:
(1) WiiWare as a platform has some real problems with visibility and getting customers to download titles. This affects all games, good and bad.
(2) Icon Games have released some really weak titles. Seriously, I'm a big fan of WiiWare but wouldn't recommend any of their games to anyone. There are just too many other good games available on the service.


The sad thing is that Icon Games seems determined to point to issue #1 as the root cause of their failures while Nintendo fanboys want to point only to issue #2. In reality, both are very real factors. When good games sometimes fail on the service because of how that service is run, what chance do bad games have?






It always makes me curious how different this is from what Apple offers though. Thousands of apps fail for every success story, yet iOS is constantly hailed as the second coming by many investors and developers. Does the extremely low barrier of entry and control over pricing really make that much difference? (I guess it must. Maybe that's not so unreasonable when some of the "games" being sold are things like Flashlight and Fart Machine, or blatant copies of successful franchises/ideas.)

[Chocobo_Rider]

It's a poor musician who blames his instrument.

Precisely.

[NWR_pap64]

There are two issues here:
(1) WiiWare as a platform has some real problems with visibility and getting customers to download titles. This affects all games, good and bad.

(2) Icon Games have released some really weak titles. Seriously, I'm a big fan of WiiWare but wouldn't recommend any of their games to anyone. There are just too many other good games available on the service.


The sad thing is that Icon Games seems determined to point to issue #1 as the root cause of their failures while Nintendo fanboys want to point only to issue #2. In reality, both are very real factors. When good games sometimes fail on the service because of how that service is run, what chance do bad games have?

EVERYBODY LISTEN TO THIS MAN AS HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH.

Everybody is basically playing the blame game on one another, yet the reality of the situation is that it's a little bit of both. Nintendo simply didn't support WiiWare enough, even when it got the games people wanted. They were late on implementing the SD card solution, they were late to support demos and even when they did it was very limited to the point of it being a fat joke.

It's true that WiiWare deserves better games from developers, but like I said earlier, even when it had the high quality games Nintendo didn't support it enough and thus ignored it in favor of highly profitable retail releases. It's like a friend of mine said to me once: WiiWare and Virtual Console profits are a a trickle in a massive sea of profit generated from casual gamers and retail releases. Which one do you think Nintendo will pay attention to the most?

[BlackNMild2k1]

Not that it makes any difference whatsoever, but I did see a commercial for WiiWare a few weeks ago. I don't know if that sort of thing happens often as I don't watch broadcast/cable TV anymore but I was shocked as I didn't think Nintendo would do that (not that they have much else to advertise for Wii right now).

[ejamer]

Why should NoA take a risk on relatively small profits from Xenoblade when they've got Zelda just around the corner? Why invest time, money, and effort into promoting WiiWare when only a fraction of Wii consoles are connected online anyway?  As a gamer, it sometimes bugs me how Nintendo focuses so squarely on big-profit releases that they virtually ignore niche endeavors. But sometimes that's the way this business works. When you look at Nintendo's balance sheet, it's hard to argue with consistent profit earned over many many years.

(Sadly those profits aren't much consolation to all the small developers that poured their heart and soul into WiiWare games, getting only tepid sales and limited marketing support in return.)

[Deguello]

This is one of those stories where, whether or not the person has a point, it matters who is complaining.  The fact that this companies games look horrible and that their representative, through some alchemical train of thought, manages to blame Nintendo for poor critical reception of their games (what?) shows that they're just being bitter that their game didn't sell better than Lit or something.

And this is actually a good reason why I like the sales threshold system as it not only encourages the development of good, attention-grabbing, and appealing games, but also there is the quality control aspect that keeps WiiWare stocked with good, or failing that, at least appealing-to-some games.  Unfortunately it leads to stories like this where a developer of a game that failed to garner enough sales doesn't get their royalties.  Considering their lineup, sucks to be them.

But this will probably be a moot point in the future as the 3DS eShop has no sales threshold for anything and this will likely be true of the Wii U as well.

[Chocobo_Rider]

I guess the formation of my opinion stems from the idea that if WiiWare were (realistically) impossible to profit from, why would ANYONE do it?  You'd have a better chance on a return investing in lottery tickets.

But yes, on a related note, the layout of something like the Shop Channel could massively benefit from a facelift.