The Royal Wii

Submitted by Paul Munn on November 8, 2007 – 12:25 am6 Comments

Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog wrote something a couple of days ago that initially made me squint and shake my head. It was a revamp of the basic “The Wii is a mini-game machine” idea into an idea that the Wii is still a party-centric console where all of Nintendo’s games are going to be local multiplayer games and nothing will be designed for a single-player experience. After listening to this week’s Gamers With Jobs podcast, however, I’ve stopped squinting and shaking my head. I think Mr. Totilo is right.

In hindsight the system seems built for multiplayer play, right down to the very name of it. It’s not an I-anything or a Me-anything like Apple would make. It’s a “we” or “us” group device. This overarching, sweeping idea goes beyond the motion control gimmick that has everybody hung up and scratching their heads, and looking back it seems to make complete sense. The preponderance of mini-games in the Wii games aren’t much fun alone.

When the GWJ Conference Call crew this week all agreed that if someone bought a Wii and lived alone they would be very pissed right now, they were echoing the experiences of all of the solo gamers out there who bought one on the initial high of playing the Wii with others. They were also proving Mr. Totilo’s point. If you game alone, you don’t want a Wii, you just don’t. It won’t be fun for you. It’s for groups, and the games appearing are for groups. The cry “There’s nothing to play on it!” is for people who don’t want to replay the mini-games with friends.

One game that, again in hindsight, seems to prove Nintendo’s marketing strategy would succeed is Guitar Hero. While fun to play alone, it’s much more fun to have an audience, and it’s even more fun than that to have everyone in the room take turns. Take the next step to Rock Band and you have a simultaneous multiplayer musical party experience. Guitar Hero III is on the Wii but Rock Band won’t be this fall. Will we see excellent sales of Guitar Hero III on the Wii? I’d guess we will.

Does this mean that single-player games won’t sell on the console? You’d think that the solo gamer crowd that got suckered in would flock to them, but N’Gai Croal highlighted that Metroid Prime 3 might just be the third punch in the face for Retro, having sold only 385,000 copies in two months into the 13 million installed base of the console. He lightheartedly suggests it might be time for Retro to pull a Bungie and go work for someone else, or some other console, chalking up the low sales numbers to either indifference from Nintendo marketing or Nintendo not caring about marketing to hardcore gamers. But if Totilo is right and almost everyone who bought the Wii did it for multiplayer games — consciously or no — then a single-player only game like Metroid Prime really doesn’t have much hope, does it?

http://www.routermall.com used cisco

“If you game alone, you don’t want a Wii, you just don’t. It won’t be fun for you.”

I totally disagree. Could you back this statement up? How exactly do you know what will be fun for me again?

“It’s for groups, and the games appearing are for groups.”

Most of the games I’ve bought and nearly all the games I’m looking forward to this holiday are single player experiences.

Sure, there are a lot of fun party games, but they are not even the majority of whats available, let alone all “the games appearing”.

I would argue that much of the 360 games suffer from a similar issue, in that, if you play alone (as in offline), the games may not be as fun. They are not so much about the single player experience either, but about online multiplayer. I would never be so brazen as you and say “YOU WILL NOT HAVE FUN WITH THE 360 OFFLINE”, but certainly the 360 experience is hampered by not having a LIVE gold membership.
http://www.fourhman.com Joe – fourhman.com

Metroid Prime doesn’t sell because Metroid Prime has never sold and nobody outside of the video game world knows what the hell a Metroid is. Nintendo has boned the marketing for the game every time.

Super Paper Mario, Twilight Princess, Elebits, Metroid Prime 3, Trauma Center. All single player first-year Wii games that I have been quite happy with. Had I the time, I would have picked up Resident Evil 4 and Sonic/Secret Rings as well.

Not to mention all the hundred virtual console games that are predominantly single player.

What a clever way to dress up baseless Nintendo Hate.

They got us again, UC.
http://www.farbot.com/ Paul Munn

@used cisco and Joe fourhman:
Totilo’s article says that the system is being marketed primarily as a multiplayer machine, and that the games appearing for it and being marketed for it are multiplayer either lightly — as in the new 2nd player mode in Mario Galaxy — or heavily with Wii Play, Wii Sports, and Warioware. Even the single player games are being shown with multiple people sitting on a couch, eyes on the set, while one person plays, he says.

Joe you seem to agree with N’Gai that Nintendo didn’t market Metroid Prime 3 aggressively enough.

I keep hearing that first party is the only thing that sells well on the Wii. So if third-party titles don’t sell well, and first-party titles are dominated by a multiplayer focus and everyone who buys a Wii buys it after playing Wii Sports alone, what does that tell you? That tells you that the market Nintendo is growing and creating is a multiplayer market.

And if Nintendo is the only one making single-player titles because third party publishers find they’re not selling then Wii owners can have a whole lot of fun waiting and waiting for the next big single player title to come down the line. Other systems have multiple publishers selling single player titles because those systems are not being _marketed_ as multiplayer only machines.

Note my emphasis on marketed again.

The Wii is fully capable of single player greatness. Heck, even the normaly 360-centric GWJ podcast crew universally acknowledged that Metroid Prime 3 is the BEST implementation of Wii control to date in a game. Nintendo just doesn’t want to market to the single player market.

Will the installed base get big enough to support more single-player games?

Is 13 million shipped worldwide not big enough for a renowned Nintendo title like Metroid Prime 3 to do 250k copies a month?
http://www.farbot.com/ Paul Munn

I just remembered an exception to the above, silly me, it’s Resident Evil 4 Wii. One million copies later, it’s a success, as our own Stephen wrote recently. PLUS it’s a third-party game.

This leans toward marketing deficiencies at Nintendo. Was Capcom’s marketing strong for this title? Could its success be affected by the fact that the hardcore gamers who bought it all knew what it was and so weren’t taking a chance on it, e.g. they wanted to play it with Wii controls and had all already bought it / rented it / played it before?

Is this an anomaly or was there great marketing for RE4Wii that others can learn from?
http://www.fourhman.com Joe – fourhman.com

Well, that’s always been the trouble with Nintendo consoles. The first party stuff sells, the third party stuff either lingers or gets lucky.

I think that’s a separate discussion from agreeing with the blanket statement that “if someone bought a Wii and lived alone they would be very pissed right now.” That little bit of trolldom exists outside of Nintendo’s marketing strategies or the performance of third parties.

I believe that translates to a feeling of gamer’s entitlement that Nintendo is somehow supposed to drop a AAA every week. And as a corollary to that, these games have to be “hardcore” or they don’t count. In under a year, I personally purchased ten Wii titles, the only regret being Cooking Mama. Add in VC purchases and Channel downloads, and I have had plenty to do (both single- and multi-player) for the year.

We constantly hear people complain that games are too long and convoluted for anybody to play through, yet gamers demand more and more titles every month. This seems incompatible to me. Clearly, nobody is playing these games to completion. Somehow, Nintendo is expected to make accessible, short, replay-laden, hardcore, new IP games every week. Anything less than that makes the Wii a failure or, at the least, a fad toy for the casual market.
http://www.routermall.com used cisco

@Paul,

I totally agree with much of your premise. Clearly, Nintendo is pushing its multiplayer advantage with the Wii. The thing has a huge potential for party style atmospheric gaming experiences. I would add that part of the reason of that pushing is NOT that they are abandoning the single player experience, but rather have recognized that a fair amount of gamers will buy games like MP3 or RE4Wii even with no mainstream marketing. The lack of awareness of the Wii is not in the gaming community but in the expanded audience. The people who would want the wii for its multiplayer/casual games are the same people who NEED to be marketed too.

I understand that gamers can be childish, to the point that if we don’t feel like our egos are being directly stroked, then we must therefore be being abandoned, but there is an alternative and that is the possibility that Nintendo realizes that grass roots marketing among the Nintendo hardcore is sufficient to drive the sales they are looking for on the core titles.

As for the marketing that Totilo mentions, I think it can be easily attributed to the fact that games look more fun on TV when you show a group interacting. No one wants to see a lone teen on a couch with doritos and Mt. Dew screaming at an opponent while playing Halo. Yet thats what much of the xbox experience really is about.

All that being said, your very thoughtful response was still unable to make any sense of this arbitrary comment.

“If you game alone, you don’t want a Wii, you just don’t. It won’t be fun for you. It’s for groups, and the games appearing are for groups.”

I game alone most of the time. I am really happy with the Wii. Most of the single player games I have been, and am looking forward to, are on the Wii exclusively. Its pretty simple. Your taste may be different and thats fine. Our differences make for a great gaming landscape.