FEATURE: Mature Games Failing on Wii and DS – Why?
- Scribbled on April 17th, 2009 by Jordan Lund
- Filed in Features, Industry News, NPD, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii
It seems like publishers of mature titles on Nintendo platforms simply cannot win for trying. People complain about Nintendo hardware heavily favoring “kids games”, and yet when mature titles actually are released the reception tends to be positively frigid.
The NPD sales results for March were released the other day and among all the hardware statistics were some pretty shocking results for mature software.
The critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (scoring 94 on Metacritic) sold just 89,000 units in March. It was expected to do far better than that considering the franchise and the rave reviews – check out the GameStooge review.
By comparison, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories on the PSP sold 161,000 units in the first week alone, garnering 327,000 unit sales in the first month and 2.6 million in lifetime US sales to date. GTA: Vice City Stories didn’t do nearly as well, but still managed 50,000 in sales the first week, 134,000 the first month and 1.43 million lifetime in the US.
It’s frankly stunning that a decently reviewed title on a hardware platform with over 34 million potential American customers only reached 0.26% of them.
The problem doesn’t seem to be isolated to the DS either.
Sega has had the exact same issue reaching a mature audience on the Wii. Their new game Mad World suffered a similar fate. A high level of buzz, decent review scores (82 on Metacritic) and yet it only turned around 66,000 sales to a potential audience of 22 million. Just 0.29% of Wii owners decided to take a chance on MadWorld.
Sega saw similar (but lower) numbers in February with the release of House of the Dead: Overkill selling just 45,000 units. Last year, No More Heroes was supposed to be a breakthrough title on the Wii, reaching a new level of mature gamers. The results? First months sales in the US just barely over 100,000 and a life to date top of 250,000. Globally, it has done okay at around 400,000 but it has taken a year and 3 regions to get there (Japan represents just 10% of the titles sales.)
Unfortunately, this seems to be about par for the course for Nintendo platforms. For ages, publishers have complained that Nintendo can profit from producing games on Nintendo hardware, but third parties are pretty much out of luck. 44% of Wii titles (219 out of 477) sell less than 100,000 units, so it would seem that Sega is in good company.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Wii games sell very slowly. Call of Duty: World at War on the Wii sold 40,000 in it’s first week. Now it has reached 1.07 million copies.
MadWorld and GTA: CTW will hit 1 million, but it will take time.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:13 am
people only buy Nintendo’s consoles for mario, zelda and pokomon games
April 18th, 2009 at 6:23 am
Um… so why is it the GTA: Chinatown Wars is seen as doing super poorly? Comparing it to Vice City Stories seems to prove that it is doing okay. If that one sold almost 1.5 million, then Chinatown should sell around that. But look at the games. Yea, so Chinatown got SOME very good reviews and others were decent… but look at the games pics. Most people see that style of game and think ehhhh it looks very NES GTA-like. I don’t think I wana pay that much for a game like that… or better yet, the majority of DS owners may not even know about the NES games and see Chinatown as a weird cheap rip off of the new versions. As for Madworld, the type of game it is and the reviews don’t match. The reviews aren’t too high and the game just looks mysterious… nobody has come out with a good preview/review of it.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Like I say in the article… CTW was released to an audience of 34 million people and it sold to 89,000 of them. That’s a pretty pathetic market penetration.
The PSP GTA games had a smaller audience and sold more.
Therein lies the problem, it seems that on Nintendo platforms if your game doesn’t feature cute puppies, Mario or some gimmick attachment for the controller it sells like crap.
Even if your game is the best reviewed game of the year so far.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:46 am
Loads of people are playing Chinatown Wars–but they’re just not paying for it. The demographic that plays it, is savvy enough to know how to download DS games.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
You say that “they can’t win for trying.” This is true. The games are there but people aren’t buying. But I know some who are and they really enjoy the games. I hope they do not stop trying because they cannot win. I think, given time, these games will succeed especially given the interactivity with the Nintendo console.
May 6th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
well its no that the games arent good, its not the genre that people want on the wii, they want great titles that the ps3 and 360 have, the want titles like resident evil 5, other great titles and series like assasins creed 2, when they said it wasn’t coming out for Wii that was a bummer, besides what is more important game play or graphics, every month i see my friend buy ps3 and 360 games for $50-60 and passing them within a day or two, they are so short! due to the high resolution of the graphics to hide away the game play, that is why they don’t publish the games for wii in which they will have to work more on game play then graphics, and they use high graphics to make up for the short or ok game play. And the games are possible but it is that the game makers and programmers are just too lazy to make them look good, see monster hunter 3 that game looks great, even the conduit has some great graphics, so those are game makers that actually try.
AND STOP SAYING THAT WII CANT DO MATURE GAMES BECAUSE IT HELL COULD. FPS are perfect for the Wii too. China town wars got higher than a 9 in game informer, and everyone i know who has it loves it.
May 19th, 2009 at 12:16 am
I wonder if the GTA DS sales are low because of piracy? Whatever the case, It’s a shame that Nintendo is getting it’s kiddie image back in full force.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:42 am
[...] that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars will be hitting the PlayStation Portable. The game had struggled on the DS despite rave reviews (including ours, selling only 110,000 worldwide in its first week – [...]