A letter from a harcore gamer to third-parties

[stickmode]

Hello, if you see the sales of the last hardcore games on the Wii are totaly dissapointed. I want to focus in this issue and try to explain what really happen here and what the third-parties can do to change this situation definitely.
From a hardcore gamer view there are couple of issues that must be fixed.
First checking the sales of: The Conduit, HOD:OverKill and Mad World you can see all surpassed the 300,000 copies worldwide. This is the first bar to make profitable a game. The sales of the Wii market are low and due the economic crisis are even more slow, but this not mean that can't be sucessfull in the long term. From 500,000 to 800,000 is medium sucessfull and starting from 1,000.000 copies worldwide is complete sucessfull (for a Wii game due to low development cost). Generaly we focus on the US sales to track if the game has sucess, but talking about the Wii this is a wrong way. We need to focus on the worldwide sales, becose the Wii's market is very different from the xbox360/ps3 market and the third-party developers are accustomed to these results (if a xbox360 game sells 2 million copies in the first week, then they expect the same for a Wii hardcore game).
This is a erroneous assumption, they need to know well the Wii's market, how the Wii owners (hardcore&casual) react. I think there's a huge amount of hardcore gamers on the Wii, the problem is they're unbelievers and they need to prove if the game has enogh quality to make a purchase, for example the ports that are sucessfully are ports that gain sucess in other consoles and the Wii owners know that, this means they're completely sure the title has quality like Guitar Hero and Rock Band for example.
There's a mentality pushing by the press that all the Wii games suck, are shovelware and only the first-party games matters, but if one investigate the Wii's catalogue you will find great harcore games from the third-party. We need to support them, becose if you don't the third-parties lose interest in the console and deliver their AAA titles to other consoles. We need to send a clear message to the third-parties: "We support your games, but you need to improve to make authentic AAA titles on the Wii"
Next, I will continue. But I want your opinion...
What do you think?
What are we doing to change this Vicious Cycle?
We are hardcore gamers and we want more, much more hardcore mature AAA titles on the Wii

 

[DBloke]

Pfft
Another rant from he that don't know what hes talking about

I have said this over 9000 times
"Sod this hardcore nonsense and just enjoy playing games"

 

[Clash Man]

I for one have a completely different definition on hardcore games. It's not so much about mature games, but their difficulty. I really hate when I get a new Zelda or Mario game and I beat it in less than a day. I could care less if there is blood and guts, but the sad fact is that today developers are aiming towards the less skilled. This is not a problem for it brings in a lot more profit, but I feel that they should still appeal to the hardcore gamers. An easy way to accomplish this would be to simply add a difficulty setting.

 

[stickmode]

Continue>>
Well, you need to think from a gamer perspective than only for a business perspective and adapt a smart strategy to gain profit over the Wii market. How to convince the 60 millions Wii owners to date, to buy your game?First you need a quality game and show these quality features to the gamer, take for example Murumasa, this game has low publicity but Ignition promoted well the game's quality features. This means the game publicity is very important but even more important are the quality features and how you show that to the public. You can set a smart marketing strategy to lower the cost and attract the costumers. You can team along other brands to promote your product and offer special promotions (bundle your product with accessories or special edition versions), all tactics matters.
Third-parties must lauch recognized franchises in others consoles but with far better controls, focusing to do a better game and avoid the risk or experiments on the console.
The game pre-order tactics are helpful to rise the sales combined with special promotions, again in a smart form.
That's about the marketing side, but what about the game features?
The quality means your game offer great value in graphics, gameplay and replayability; that's really matters to the gamer's buying options. The developers try to make original games but they lose the way at the end, the result a poor implemented game. Is better to focus in your best, try to do the winner formula; try to do a game as close the xbox360/ps3 versions but taking total advantage of the motion controls, this game result at the end in a far better game than these versions. And of course sell better than these versions. That's innovation in terms of motion controls fully implemented, that's is what all Wii owners wanted since the Wii launch in 2006, for example Dead Space: Extraction is supposedly an original game, but this isn't the Viceral Games best. If they focus their best and deliver a game like the original third-person Dead Space with fully motion controls implementation, the game sales would be far better.
The graphics, only a few third-party developers push the Wii's graphics to the limits, the others stay with the standard development. This is a wrong strategy, there are high quality graphics engines around that support the Wii development and I don't see any Wii game that uses them, each third-party developer needs to create his own engine or license a engine to push the Wii hardware. This is helpfull, because its reduce the cost and improve the game's quality, if they used this at the start, we would never see these poor looking games with low quality than the Game Cube games and the enormus amount of shovelware.
Thankfully Capcom shows us how to do the things, they will port the MT Framework for Wii and the same sould do the others developers adapting their engines on the Wii following the Capcom strategy.
They need to take advantage of all the Wii's features that Nintendo offers (motion+, Wiispeak, Wi-fi, SDcard DLC, etc..), there are a few games that use all these features, this must to be a standard. Another issue that I see is the mayority of the games look opaque (don't look sharp and clear), I think that is because the standard development without specific engines (using filters to improve the images), for example Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2008 used the xbox360 development kit to be ported directly to the Wii. This resulting in a very sharp, brighter and clear game different from others opaque Wii games like the ps2 games. Resident EvilC developers Cavia discovered that the xbox360 developer kit uses some special filters to improve the images and using these filters over Wii games make the graphics looks far better. That means there's a issue in the Wii development kit that doesn't allow the developers to improve the graphics better than the standard games, they need to use other tools to make gorgeous graphics. For example COD:WAW looks good by the detailed textures but overall looks opaque, if Treyarch share their programing experience with the developers of Cabela's Big Game Hunter, they will find the way to make far better graphics in the next COD:MW for Wii.... Take note third-party developers.
The other issue, the most games on the Wii are fall short; only 8 or 10 hours long. This is a shame because the Wii uses the same DVD-ROM disk as the xbox360 and support dual-layer DVDs too, only SSBB is a dual-layer DVD. Why you don't use them, also you can deliver a Wii game with two disk instead of one, with this you can archive 15 or 16 hours of gameplay and this must be the standard if you want to offer great game value. The Wi-fi connection, the only game that archive 32 gamers online multiplayer is MOH2 three years ago and I don't see any game that almost match that, the nintendo server infraestructure is weak, but you can deliver a dedicated server infraestructure for your games like EA does. In general you need to use all the Wii features to not minimize the Wii games in front of the other console versions and to lose interest. The DLC, why you don't offer DLC for retailer Wii games; is a Nintendo's restriction or you simply don't want to support that. Because the Wii support SD-cards upto 32GB, enough to store 3 or 4GBs of DLC; I'm have a 16GB SDHC card waiting for DLC like the COD:WAW map-packs, TR:Underworld new levels, The Conduit, expansions, new caracters, patches, etc; you're losing your money if you don't take this advantage. I hope in the next Wii games you start to do that...
Next, I will talk about the Nintendo's passive and conservative attitude>>