Third parties missed some major opportunities
By the end of 2014, Xbox 360 had slid past Wii to become thebest-selling seventh generation console in the US. While a fantastic achievement for Microsoft, this event also punctuates the drastic shift in Nintendo’s market dominance. Where once Wii wason trackto become the best-selling dedicated gaming console of all time, it’s now all but forgotten.
There are various reasons why history played out the way it did, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the games, and Wii’s library had some pretty glaring holes. To be fair, there were a lot of fantastic games on Wii — Nintendo itself published some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful titles in company history, while several third parties were able to ride the wave to good fortune.
Sadly, the industry at large didn’t support Wii in a manner befitting of a market leader, resulting in a legacy of wasted potential. Had these publishers done a better job in leveraging their biggest brands on the little white box, the current gaming landscape could have been much different.
In a2009 interviewwith Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime expressed frustration regarding why the biggest third-party titles were skipping Wii:
“I’ve had this conversation with every publisher who makes content that is not available on my platform. The conversation goes like this: ‘We have a 22-million unit installed base. We have a very diverse audience… We have active gamers that hunger for this type of content. And why isn’t it available?'”
The unfortunate reason was that, prior to Wii’s launch, most publishers didn’t have faith in Nintendo’s unconventional strategy, especially coming off of GameCube’s lukewarm performance. By the timethey realizedthat Wii mania was real, they were too entrenched in HD development to easily shift gears. When supportdidcome, it was in the form of minigame collections and low-priority efforts farmed out to C-team studios, most of which seemed to target the stereotypical “casual” gamer while ignoring the rest of the audience.
The Wii wasn’t conceived as a “casual machine,” but rather a low-risk development option that could ideally satisfy everyone — with a focus on videogame newbies, true, but not an exclusive focus. From the beginning, there wasenormous interestamong the enthusiast crowd for more substantial software, but as the years slipped away and their needs weren’t met, they simply turned their attention elsewhere.
There were sporadic attempts to appeal to enthusiasts, though most typically fell into the mid-tier category — the types of games that, on a well-served platform, would help round out the library. But without headliners to attract an audience in the first place, theMadWorlds andLittle King’s Storys of the world were stuck playing an empty venue.
It’s clear that the Wii was no powerhouse and wouldn’t have been able to realize many of the eventual HD hits in a satisfactory fashion. However, you can’t tell me that publishers weren’t sitting on golden preexisting properties that could have easily been adapted to the hardware — properties that had a near guaranteed chance of finding success, which would in turn have led to a greater influx ofauxiliary Wii software and a healthier third-party ecosystem overall.
Just to name a few examples…
Kingdom Hearts
Remember the rumors years ago thatKingdom Hearts IIIon Wii might be happening? A series whose chief draw is allowing you to visit famous Disney worlds and battle alongside famous Disney heroes seemed like the obvious choice for a Nintendo platform, where family-friendly entertainment is the order of the day.
Square Enix thought so too, just not in the manner we had hoped. FollowingKingdom Hearts IIin 2005, numerous word-building side stories and interquels were released on portables, with the bulk appearing on Nintendo machines. One in particular,Dream Drop Distancefor 3DS, was even billed as a lead-in to the eventualKingdom Hearts III.
Meanwhile, the series was completely absent on home consoles. This would have been a perfect opportunity for Square Enix to portKHIandIIonto Wii in their “Final Mix” forms. That way, those who followed the series on PS2 would be able to transition smoothly, while others with little exposure to the games would have the perfect entry point. And with all these returning and newly minted fans on Wii, maybe the PSP-exclusiveBirth By Sleepwould have had another platform on which to score sales, which were otherwise soft in Western territories.
Metal Gear
WhenSuper Smash Bros. Meleewas brought out West, it introduced players to Marth and Roy, two unknown characters from a Japan-exclusive franchise calledFire Emblem. The warm reception these fresh faces received gave Nintendo the incentive to start localizing future installments in the tactical RPG saga. I had hoped that Solid Snake’s appearance inSuper Smash Bros. Brawlwould have led to a similar decision regardingMetal Gear, but no dice.
Why was Snake inBrawlto begin with? Definitely not because of his rich history on Nintendo platforms —Metal Geardid more for PlayStation than it ever did for NES. No, it’s because Hideo Kojimapractically beggedMasahiro Sakurai to put him in. Regardless of how the arrangement came about, Snake was a welcome addition to theSmashroster, quickly rising to the top of many players’ lists of favorite fighters. A smart publisher would have tried to capitalize on that kind of exposure.
Konami could have tested the waters with a Wii reprint ofThe Twin Snakes, which had become quite rare in its original GameCube format. Follow that up with withMGS2and3ports, possibly an up-port ofPeace Walkeras well.MGS4was never going to come over for obvious reasons, but hey, 360 didn’t get it either, and Xbox andMetal Gearare good buddies these days.
Street Fighter
Did you know, if we disregard the combined-SKUResident Evil 5, that the originalStreet Fighter IIfor Super Nintendo is thesingle best-selling gamein Capcom’s history at 6.3 million copies? It also happens to be the best-selling third-party game in the SNES library — and that’s before we even factor in the various updates!
Among Wii owners were a fair number of lapsed gamers — people who may have gamed in the arcades or on an NES or SNES back in the day but have since lost interest. I guarantee a significant cross section of that group were formerSFIIplayers itching for a proper follow-up. And since the goal of theStreet Fighter IVproject was to make the series accessible again to the widest possible audience, it would have behooved Capcom to include in its multi-platform plans the console built entirely around the concept of accessibility.
you’re able to’t tell me thatSFIVwas dependent on high-end hardware — it was designed to be a traditional 2D fighter with 3D window dressing. The fact that a spot-on port was later developed for 3DS, with static backgrounds as the sole concession, should be all the proof that a Wii version could have looked and played just fine.
If you want to argue thatSFIVwas ill-suited to Wii because the Wii Remote was an inappropriate fighting game controller, I think you’re overestimating the general game-playing public’s need for the “perfect gaming controller.” Besides, anyone who desired a more traditional pad would have made the effort to buy one — such as withTatsunoko vs. Capcom.
Speaking ofTvC, there’s a game that strikes a fine balance between technical skill and accessibility. Although I appreciate the effort it took to localize such a licensing nightmare, that seahorse in the logo was the kiss of death — only hardcore anime aficionados had the slightest inkling who these strange new characters were. It’s odd that Capcom would invest inTvCyet couldn’t be bothered to hammer out an adequateSFIVport, which would have had a significantly larger shot at finding a receptive audience on Wii.
Persona
Atlus has enjoyed a wonderful working relationship with Nintendo since the former’s founding in 1986, and that relationship thrives to this day. In fact, over the past generation, the bulk of Atlus’ in-house productions have found an exclusive home on Nintendo platforms, including new IPs likeEtrian Odyssey,Trauma Center, andRadiant Historia.
Of important note is how Atlus has gradually been shifting the entireMegami Tenseifranchise back into the Nintendo camp, beginning withDevil Survivoron DS and culminating withShin Megami Tensei IVon 3DS. One particularMegaTensub-series, however, has remained with Sony:Persona.
It’s apparent that Atlus was reluctant to jump into HD development right away. ReleasingPersona 3as a late-gen PlayStation 2 title was one thing, but sticking to PS2 forPersona 4as well? That earned the company quite a few stares. But if Atlus was insistent on squeezing out every last ounce from legacy hardware, why not prep thosePersonas for simultaneous release on the low-spec Wii as well? Atlus already had a Wii development pipeline in place, so the financial risk would have been extremely minimal. Wii versions could have only added to those games’ success.
The series has finally come to Nintendo in the form ofPersona Qon 3DS, although the game’s main selling point — the crossover ofP3andP4characters — would feel more appropriate had those two titles actually appeared on a Nintendo platform prior.
Grand Theft Auto
“Nintendo has done all it can to persuade Take-Two Interactive Software to bring theGrand Theft Autofranchise to Nintendo consoles, and it is now up to the third-party publisher to decide whether Rockstar Games’ immensely popular series will appear on Wii.”
Reggie Fils-Aime sharedthis nuggetin December 2006, shortly after the Wii’s launch, to let the world know that Nintendo desired theviolent crime series on its hardware (thoseGame Boy ColorandAdvancetitles don’t count). Sadly, Take-Two didn’t seem to want to play ball and even laughed at the notionjust one year later, when then-executive chairman Strauss Zelnick asserted, “[T]here are other titles better suited to the Wii thanGrand Theft Auto.”
Nonetheless, talks continued, and Take-Two and Rockstar Gameseventuallydecided to give Nintendo a shot… with a DS game. That’s not what fans were asking for, but baby steps, we figured. Take-Two CEO Ben Federdid statethatGrand Theft Auto: Chinatown Warswas an important step in the company’s relations with Nintendo and suggested that this new title could pave the way for future developments.
The rest is sick, sad history.Chinatown Warsearned rave reviews, becoming thehighest-ranked DS titleon Metacritic, yet soldjust under 90,000 copiesin the US in its launch month. Not willing to take any chances, Rockstar quickly announced PSP and mobile ports. Mature games were reaffirmed aspoison on DS, and all hopes of anotherGTAon a Nintendo platform vanished.
Let’s attempt to understand whyChinatown Warsfailed. First,GTAis not a handheld series. Some brands are simply better suited to home consoles than handhelds or vice versa —Monster Hunter, for instance. Yeah, bothLiberty City StoriesandVice City Storieson PSP were million sellers, but those sales were a drop in the bucket compared to what the console installments regularly pull in. Those were ported to PS2 months later too, so it’s not like Rockstar had full confidence in them either.
Still, bothLCSandVCSsold much better thanChinatown Wars, which brings me to my second point:GTAonly became a phenomenon withGTAIIIand the leap into the third dimension. Taking the series back to its top-down roots was never going to appeal to all the same people who fell in love with the real-world atmosphere and fully voiced and acted cutscenes, no matter what kind of review scores it earned.
Need further proof? Although you may find copious news bites around the web lamenting the poor sales ofChinatown Warson DS, you’d be hard-pressed to find any mention of sales of the PSP port. It’s safe to surmise that it tanked even worse than on DS, because Take-Two would have said something otherwise. The mobile ports likely outsold those two combined, though it’s difficult to draw a solid conclusion there when sales were aided by rock-bottom mobile pricing.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Warswas the wrong game for the wrong platform. From day one, Rockstar should have been working on a Wii game in the desired 3D style as Nintendo had originally intended. It would have been more expensive to produce, though I doubt anywhere in the range ofGTAIV‘s $100 million price tag. If Rockstar didn’t want to take that gamble, it could have assembled a PS2 trilogy collection, or ported the PSP games, oranything! We’re talking about the biggest home console of all time, after all!
If you still doubt the viability ofGTAon Wii, considerCall of Duty: World at War, which soldover a million copieson Wii. Big deal, you figure, since sales of the PS3 and 360 versions vastly outstripped it. But also consider that Activision has repeatedly withheld information regarding the Wii versions ofCall of Dutyinstallments up to and sometimes even after release, limiting awareness to those who had prior knowledge or had seen one of the rare TV commercials. Somehow, the game still broke a million — can you imagine how much better it could have performed had Activision given it exposurecomparableto the HD builds?
How could Take-Two wholeheartedly say, during a period when Wii was selling faster than any other home console before or since, that the audience wasn’t there?Grand Theft Autois one of the biggest gaming brands of all time! Its most recent entry hasshipped 45 million unitsacross all platforms! Its consumer base includes every type of gamer, from kids to adults, from the hardest of the hardcore to those whose only other gaming purchase in a year is the latestMadden!
If Take-Two honestly believed that there was little to no chance of success in adaptingGrand Theft Autoto Wii, it means that either its marketing department is completely clueless as to what makesGTAso appealing, thereby attributing each record-breaking achievement to blind luck, or everyone in management simply didn’t give a shit.
As you can see, I’m not suggesting that publishers should have thrown millions at unproven concepts. All it would have taken to get the ball rolling was some low-risk ports based on established, popular brands. Even if some of these franchises wound up not resonating with the Wii audience, most are powerful enough that they would have been accepted without question.
Had key third-party tentpoles been established and found success on Wii early on, smaller studios would have felt comfortable in producing Wii content. Instead of the sudden decline as casual players lost interest, Wii could have maintained a steady momentum by serving the enthusiast crowd low-tech yet feature-rich software, in turn extending its life. By the time Nintendo introduced a follow-up console, publishers would have been far more willing to offer support than they wound up being with Wii U.
Though we can only speculate precisely how such a movement would have affected Wii and the industry overall, it could only have been a net positive — for Nintendo as well as third parties that struggled to stay in the black or simply wanted to grow their consumer base. you’re able to blame Nintendo for certain Wii shortcomings, but third parties are at fault for letting painfully obvious opportunities slip through the canyon-sized cracks.
