Kevin Becker dot net

After 19 months, the Wii is still hard to find. I’m not aware of any stores nearby that have stock for long after getting a shipment. There is economics at work here, plus the allure of a popular, hard to get item, but there’s more to it. Nintendo is making tons of Wiis. With worldwide sales of above 27 million, they’ve sold more than twice that of the PS3 and even about 50% more than the Xbox 360, which had a year head start in sales. (Source: vgchartz.com) Something is different about the Wii and its sales.

When I first heard about the Wii, I thought that it would be a flop. Honestly, I thought that it was possible that Nintendo would go the way of Sega after Nintendo’s poor Gamecube sales if the next console was a financial failure. I certainly didn’t want to see Mario and Link in games of the poor quality of recent Sonic games, but then a funny thing happened. As we all know, the Wii is a hit, but it is a hit despite that it has all the things that gamers typically don’t want and doesn’t have all the things that gamers typically do want from the newest consoles. First, it has a gimmicky controller and multiple games that have their own attachments for the controller, plus the nunchuck and the classic controller. Historically, add-ons and special controllers don’t sell well. (See: Sega 32X, Nintendo Power Glove, Steel Battalion). Second, it has a completely new user interface. Nintendo tried new interfaces before with the Virtual Boy and it was one of the biggest disasters in Nintendo’s history. Third, the Wii isn’t capable of high definition picture resolutions, which was one of the big things gamers were excited about with this generation of consoles. Fourth, it has extremely poor online service for multiplayer with the abysmal friend code system that is so far behind Xbox Live or even the Playstation Network. All of these things made the Wii seem like a terrible idea to the typical hardcore gamer. The only things going for it are its lower price and the typical Nintendo franchises. These things held the GameCube afloat, but just barely. Even with all that, the Wii sold and isn’t stopping anytime soon. Beyond that, the Wii isn’t selling to hardcore gamers, at least not as much as previous consoles.

The Wii sets itself apart by selling to the people historically least likely to play video games… people over 40, women, and every other non-gamer demographic out there, including my parents. Not that it sold really poorly with gamers, it being a Nintendo console after all, but the percentage of hardcore gamers buying the Wii is probably less than any console ever. Let’s look at why this has happened. There are a few obvious reasons: the low price, the familiar Nintendo franchises and the hype of the console that no one can seem to find in stores. Beyond that, I think there’s two broad reasons in addition to those: the controler and the games, and both these reasons show interesting trends in gaming.

The Wii remote is the first motion sensitive video game controller to go mainstream. It’s the console controller with the fewest buttons since the original Nintendo Entertainment System’s controller from 1985 (counting the buttons on only the Wii remote, not any add-ons). One of the problems many people who are traditionally “non-gamers” have with games are the controls. The controllers and their buttons are not intuitive to them. They probably weren’t for me either, but I don’t remember back that far. Video game controllers have been second nature to my hands for more than 15 years, so I grew up with simpler controllers, simpler games and grew into today’s gaming control complexities. In addition to difficulties with the physical controller, navigating a 3D world is difficult for the uninitiated. The Wii gets around both these issues with its unique motion controls. Not only are there fewer buttons to learn, the act of controlling on screen movement is as simple as moving your hand. Rather than forcing your brain to translate your wishes to the control scheme of the buttons, your brain simply uses your already well developed muscle functions to control events on screen naturally, so the games are much easier to get into in terms of interaction.

More intuitive control is an important step in getting more people playing games, but makes little difference if you’re pushing games like Ikaruga (a scrolling space shooter that is masochistically difficult to master), .Hack (a single player, offline, japanese-style role playing game [JRPG] episodic series where you play as a video gamer who plays a virtual reality massively multiplayer online roleplaying game [MMORPG] where some players are unable to log out to get back to the real world; you play in that online roleplaying game’s interface as if you are in the virtual reality world with others, despite it being a single player game… yes it’s that abstract and convoluted, really!), or Deus Ex (a cyber-punk hybrid of first person shooter and role playing games with a deep, complex story with an equally deep and complex system of character customization). I could go on and on listing games that are either very difficult to play and master, very difficult wrap your head around or just plain weird. Those aren’t the type of games that bring in casual gamers. Games like Wii Sports, Wii Play, Rayman Raving Rabids, Warioware and now Wii Fit give non-gamers accessible experiences that can be played for small amounts of time without the mental and physical investment of a more hardcore game. The Wii succeeds because it primarily provides these types of games.

The combination of these two factors results in the fact that the Wii gives experiences that are genuinely fun. More importantly, it is fun in a way that is obvious to most people, by being physical and being social. It’s great at a party. That said, it’s not fun in the way a speed run in a mario game, a low level challenge in an roleplaying game, or a gold star, full combo performace in Rock Band recorded for YouTube are to a hardcore gamer, but that’s Nintendo’s point. They’re catering to those who pay the bills now, and that’s not necessarily the hardcore gamer anymore.

The real question is what effect this is having on the gaming industry. Obviously, hardcore games are becoming more of a niche than ever, especially on the Wii and there’s lots of evidence of it. A game like the previously mentioned Ikaruga will never see retail release again, as Ikaruga and many like it are relegated to being downloadable games because those hardcore enough to play it will be hardcore enough to buy games on services like Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and the Playstation Network Store. Another example would be Rayman, which was previously a platformer series that was transformed (or some may say perverted) into a casual assortment of mini-games like Warioware. Games which were once extremely difficult like the Ninja Gaiden series now have newer sequels released with a significantly easier level of difficulty as the default. There are exceptions to this trend, like No More Heroes for the Wii, and games that stradle line between both hardcore and casual gaming, like Rock Band, but it’s obvious that casual games are taking a bigger and bigger piece of the gaming pie.

A full critical discussion of the intricacies of the new balance between hardcore and casual games being forged today is a topic for another article though. That said, I’m not the only one thinking about the issue. IGN recently tauted 2008 as year of the “Death of Hardcore Games”. I’m not so convinced about them being dead, or if the proliferation of casual gaming is such a bad thing, but that’s a topic I’ll discuss more in the future. This is certainly an interesting time for games!