Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Once again Obama makes history.

Something just shank in today for me about this Healthcare law.

The first Black President of the United States (and first woman to be speaker of the house) has done something other presidents have been trying to do for a long time...pass healthcare reform.

It may not be as good as I wanted but at least it's a nice first step

Thursday, March 04, 2010

I just read an article about the fact that it is expected that wii sells will go down this year. That's not surprising everything has to stop at some point and this includes wii's high sales.

What I found interesting is that there are game publishers who state they aren't haven't manage to sell games well on the wii and that they won't focus so much on wii games. The publishers talked about in the article where EA, Capcom, THQ and Ubisoft.

A person form EA said that the Wii market was unpredictable. Part of me thinks what that means is they haven't really figured out how to sell to people who may have bought the wii that aren't really big gamers.

But then I remember that many gamers dislike the wii because they can't find many games aimed at them. So the problem isn't the game companies making games for gamers on a system they don't want, because the reason games are unhappy with the wii is because they don't have enough games to make them happy.

So I looked at a few of these companies sites to see what are they selling for the Wii and it looks go me that the problem is these companies aren't really putting out compelling games out on the system. At least there aren't many games that look like something I would want.

EA had the most attention paid to them in the article so I looked at their site to see the what they had for the wii and noticed only a few games that appealed to me. Though they did have a number of things I think would have sold well even if I don't care to much for them (sports games and sims related stuff)

They also have a game similar to wii sports and I think the problem there is that I am sure someone with wii sports won't fell the need to get another game similar to one they already have. Remember a big chunk of wii owners aren't games. There's a lot of older folks who got a wii for things like wii fit and wii sports. I can't help but remember when I was a kid and I wanted say a new edition of a sports game or street fighter II my mom would turn and say well you already have game like that why would you want another? I can see a lot of older wii owners taken that mindset...heck as I have gotten older I'm taking that mindset more and more.

I found similar problems across the board. The Wii has an odd mix of games, there are many tie games to stuff like game shows (There is a biggest loser game...really who would want that game) and of course lots and lots of kids games. Which makes sense giving that another big group of wii owners are kids, but the problem with having such a huge focus on this market is that kids don't buy games their parents or other adults do and I can see a bigger limit on the over all sales one can make to kids then to adults.

Now on one hand I think it's good that the companies are putting out games in hopes of drawing in more people then just hardcore gamers. It reminds me a bit of the days of the NES when we had a wide range of games, the problem is that just like back in the 80's a lot of those game being pushed out on the wii don't really look that good and back then everything was pretty much released on the NES good or bad, games for hardcore games and causal gamers. The wii just seemed to aim at the causal games and forgotten about the hardcore gamers.

I'm all for making games for causal gamers but a lot of these games don't really look that good.

I'm also surprised by the fact that some of the biggest gaming publishers didn't sell some of their biggest properties on the wii.

But what really sticks out is that even thought these comapanies say they are having a hard time selling games looking at the top selling games (at lets those listed on this wiki page) The wii has some of the highest sells figures of any game system, EVER. now it's true that it's Nintendo the company that putting out most of the high selling games on the wii and I think it's do to the reasons I listed. These are good games, they use their biggest characters and a lot of companies are just copying what the big N puts out (why get another multi sports mini games game when you already have wii sport and wii fit? And how many party games can someone really play?)

also looking at the top selling games on different platforms their seems to areas that publishers can focus on that Nintendo either doesn't really have covered or seem like there is room to grow the market for on the Wii. Like a sandbox adventure game (like grand thief auto), fighting games (wii has super smash bros but I'm shocked capcom doesn't have a Street Fighter game for the wii...the closet is is Capcom vs some group of characters popular in Japan but haven't really crossed over to America much.), etc, etc.