http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/10/bloomberg/bxwii-web.php LOS ANGELES: Nick Earl, a video-game designer, spent eight months holed up with his development team, rushing to adapt "The Godfather" for Nintendo's Wii. The reason for the long hours: Earl's employer, Electronic Arts, like some of its competitors, underestimated demand for the Wii, whose motion-activated wand lets players wield a virtual sword, mimic a golf swing or simulate strangling a victim. Instead, game makers put most of their resources into games for Sony's PlayStation 3, which was released two days earlier than the Wii in November with a more conventional hand controller. Now, publishers are scrambling to get titles to the 3.56 million American and Japanese Wii owners who have made the machine the top-selling game console this year. "Those companies are backtracking," said Anthony Gikas, an analyst at Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. "They're going to need to get their best-branded product on that platform. That will take a good 9 to 12 months." A shortage of Wii games contributed to a 25 percent drop in sales in February from a year earlier at Electronic Arts, the world's largest video-game publisher, said Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Nollenberger Capital Partners. That same month, industry sales rose 28 percent. Shares of Electronic Arts, which is based in California, have risen 3.1 percent this year, the smallest gain among the four biggest publishers. U.S. and Japanese sales of Wii players totaled 1.47 million in January and February, according to the market researchers NPD Group and Enterbrain. PlayStation 3 tallied 604,331, while stores sold 584,329 of Microsoft's Xbox 360 consoles. Wii is also leading in Europe, said Screen Digest, a research firm. Wii games, all produced by Nintendo of Japan, took 3 of the top 10 sales spots in the United States in February, said NPD, another market research firm. Nintendo's lead will widen, pressuring companies even more. The market researcher IDC has predicted that Nintendo will ship 16.1 million players this year, outpacing Microsoft's 9.87 million Xbox 360s and Sony's 9.1 million PlayStation 3s. Wii game sales will total $2.2 billion, trailing only Xbox 360, IDC said. Electronic Arts was not the only publisher slow to see Wii's appeal. Take-Two Interactive Software, based in New York, the maker of "Grand Theft Auto" games, had no Wii titles when the player was released and now plans to have three this year, said a spokesman for the game maker, Jim Ankner. Activision of California plans to release six Wii games this year, giving the second-largest U.S. game publisher a total of 11, an Activision spokeswoman, Maryanne Lataif, said. Game companies had expected PlayStation 3 to dominate based on the success of PlayStation 2, said John Taylor, an analyst with Arcadia Investment. Perceptions changed when Nintendo unveiled Wii last May in Los Angeles. Demonstration consoles attracted long lines of developers waiting to swing a virtual tennis racquet. "People got their hands on that controller and started playing games and said, 'This is fun, this is going to do better than we expected,' " the Electronic Arts chief executive, Lawrence Probst, said at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. With six months to go before Wii's release and games requiring a year or more to develop, publishers knew they were in trouble. Electronic Arts bought Headgate Studios in November to bolster Wii development. With "Godfather Black Hand Edition" and "Tiger Woods Golf 07" in stores, Electronic Arts has six Wii titles and plans to have about a dozen in all this year. The Wii may prove to be a windfall, since games cost $2 million to $5 million to create, a fraction of the $20 million to $30 million spent on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 titles, Taylor said. Also, Wii appears to be expanding the market, rather than stealing sales from rivals, he said. Ubisoft Entertainment, the maker of "Rayman" and "Tom Clancy," was the quickest to recognize Wii's appeal and is reaping the rewards. Wii games helped increase Ubisoft's sales for the December quarter by 24 percent to $405 million. In January, the French company raised its 2007 forecast for revenue growth to 16 percent from a range of 10 percent to 12 percent. Ubisoft, based in the Paris suburb of Montreuil-Sous-Bois, had seven Wii games out by December and plans six more by June, said Tony Key, vice president of marketing. "It's not really a bet anymore," he said. "It's a viable system that's going to make us money." So much for all that talk from posters that the Wii was going to be hardware-only sales and that only PS3 and XBox buyers were going to be gamers. Also - Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii is fantastic. I only wish they had been able to adapt MLB2k7 in time. Evan
with the popularity as high as it is, relatively cheap cost it is to produce the games and the simplicity of the code game producers should be all over this.
i havent got a new game for mine yet. i was going to get wiiplay(mostly for an additional remote but i procrastinated and they are sold out everywhere. i have been getting down on old zelda, bomberman 93 and super mario bros.
I got Super Paper Mario on Tuesday (I pre-ordered it). I've only played one "chapter" of the game, but so far, it's lots of fun. Extremely creative and funny, too! (Who would've thought?) EGM gave it "Game of the Month" for April.
paper mario looks pretty trippy. i was going to try and hold out another month or so before getting a new game. i just cant wait for ssb, metroid and finally a fps game that is really good. p.s. elebits is a very cool game
I said it once and I'll say it again: I apologize for underestimating Nintendo and the Wii before it launched. Didn't think it would have stood a chance against PS3 and the 360. Boy, I'm glad I was wrong.
i think it would be great if 1) they had a wireless nunchuck 2) could use two regular remotes (wiimotes if you will) at the same time.
A lot of places like Best Buy will put game discs/CDs in a machine of theirs that polishes the surface, oftentimes fixing problems like this. It might be worth a shot, rather than buying a new copy of the game.
Publishers are too driven by marketing morons......they won't support a console unless it has already proven to be a success. Even though it is a catch 22....... I hate publishers..... DD
Not even putting one or two games out for a system launch is just silly. There are so few games that everything is going to sell decently, even ports.
I suppose it is still possible for that to be true due to the designs of the three systems (360/PS3 designed to take off years after launch, Wii designed to take off at launch but maybe with some issues years after launch). Given that long-term success in this industry is heavily dependent on short-term success, that probably won't be much of a factor though. I don't think the Wii will pull a PSP (for a number of obvious reasons), but I suppose something like that could happen depending on how the three continue to do business in the next 5+ years. Keep in mind that the 360 is still the market leader at the moment, although the Wii will probably sprint by it in the near future I would imagine (considering the 360 sales in Japan and Europe....let alone NA). There were like 30-40 games on the Wii before the end of 2006 IIRC. And not everything sold decently AFAIK. Depending on your definition of decently anyway. Don't know about US numbers off-hand, but out of the 38 games released on the Wii in Japan, only 7 so far have sold over a 100K copies (and 13 have sold over 50K). This is with ~2M systems. As usual, it is kind of hard to get decent sales if your game is released on a Nintendo platform but isn't published by Nintendo (although, to be fair, sales seem to be better than previous Nintendo platforms, not to mention that crappy sales with 2M systems is better than crappy sales with 800K systems). Regarding publishers putting more effort into Wii titles, I just hope they put out games more like No More Heroes rather than simple PS2/PSP/GC ports with new controls tacked on. I can't say I'm that optimistic given the publishers mentioned, but hopefully I'll be wrong (especially if the Wii continues to sell extremely well throughout the year).
man, i cant wait for that game. killer 7 was really an impressive game and very underrated. but i do think that nintendo will start having more games designed for it, rather than ported, based on its success
I keep wanting to play the Wii but i dont know anybody who has it. I'm also wondering when the new Smash Brothers game is coming out.
I think it is a complicated issues, one where Nintendo will probably need to rely on more than just success to convince publishers to get their major developers to work on Wii titles rather than 360/PS3/PC titles (or to convince the developers themselves in the case where the developer can decide what they work on). There is Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid 3, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl in development at Nintendo. I'm guessing that 1 or possibly 2 (probably Metroid and ___) of those will hit shelves by the holiday season, although they probably won't want to release all of them during the same time (especially with GTAIV, MGS4, Halo 3, etc., hitting at the same time as well).
