Topic: Nintendo Hopes Miiverse Recommendation Engine Will Improve Tie Ratio

[Kairon]

Could all those Miis from other people on the Wii U home screen have an ulterior motive?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/30590

Nintendo's Miiverse social functionality, recently announced for the Wii U, will be able to recommend games to players that they might be interested in buying. As a result, Nintendo is hoping that they will see an improved tie ratio for their Wii U video game console.

Revealed on Sunday, Miiverse is a feature of the upcoming Wii U game console that can populate player's games and menu experiences with messages, tips, and help from other players, even when the game is only single-player. One of the aspects of Miiverse Nintendo highlighted was how the Wii U menu would show a crowd of Miis talking between themselves and walking around large icons that represented different video games. Nintendo even pointed out that games you didn't own could show up. This method of subtly introducing Wii U owners to other games they may not already own is probably part of what Nintendo was referring to in their comments.

In addition to an improved tie ratio, Nintendo believed that Wii U users would also be more active consumers in general. Nintendo pointed to those two factors, as well as their own efforts in the digital distribution space, as a pathway to improved profitability for the company.

Tie ratios are the relationship between how many consoles are sold and how many pieces of software are sold for it. Estimates from last year put the Wii tie ratio at 7.2 units of software sold for each single console sold. For comparison, the competing PlayStation 3 had an estimated 7.8 tie ratio and the XBox 360 was estimated at 8.9.

[oohhboy]

Make good games and release them. Repeat.

Good marketing isn't going to make a bad game a good one. Bad Marketing will kill a good game though.

[Kairon]

Bad Marketing will kill a good game though.

Agreed. This is just an effort to save some good games from death.

[VickiL]

There are many good Wii games that I didn't hear about until long after the fact, so I'm not going to complain about another way to learn about these games.