In one week Nintendo just sold 1.4 million copies of Super Smash Bros Brawl in the US. The only PS3 game that has even reached sales close to that is MotorStorm (which has sold 1.5 million copies) and it was released over a year ago.
To say that the Wii will be anything less than a raging blowout success is ignoring reality.
I hope you’re right, Justin. I want Nintendo to succeed. (The thought of no more Mario Party is enough to send me into convulsions.) But it seems to me that they have been concentrating only on giving certain fans what they want in terms of games. I’m not sure if this is a Nintendo issue, or coming directly from the third party developers, but I know the Wii is capable of a hell of a lot more than what we’re mostly seeing, gameplaywise.
The third party support is coming slowly, but traditional ‘high performance’ games like shooters and racing games will still go to the 360/PS3/PC for a while and probably forever. If you’re at all interested in shooters you’d have at least one of those three, so why bother porting down to the Wii which because of the lower performance and unique controller will take more effort for unproven returns, while even mediocre shooters like Kane and Lynch can break a million sales in the US alone. The only traditional shooters that we know are coming to the Wii are Red Steel 2 and CoD5. I don’t think there are any high profile racing games planned for the Wii, unless you count Need for Speed. There was the rumoured Wii Motorsports, but it was also rumoured to be cancelled, so who knows.
There’s no doubt that the Wii is selling like it is on the back of Wii Sports, Wii Play, and soon Wii Fit. The third party software that is going to keep that audience interested is arguably already there in games like Take Two’s Carnival Games, Midway’s Game Party, Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids, and so on. Rock Band is really the first third party party game (what a phrase) to be both late and poorly implemented on the Wii (not counting GH3’s mono bug).
The first mistake was not focusing their initial development on the one console with a heavy focus on casual local multiplayer. There never was a more obvious fit. The company buyouts that meant Harmonix couldn’t make Guitar Hero took place in late 06 when the Wii was a known quantity, so they can’t use length of development as an excuse. Seeing GH3 Wii sales trounce PS3 and come reasonably close to 360, they must have been kicking themselves. The “strengths of the Wii” referenced in the press release is nothing less than the perceived ignorance of the Wii audience. This is a strength from their point of view since they don’t have to waste time on figuring out how to get online play and DLC working. If I gave a fig about Rock Band or rhythm games in general, didn’t own a 360, and lived in a region where Rock Band was already out, I’d feel insulted.
It might be easy to blame Nintendo for their aggravating silence on their storage issues (Wii Ware launched in Japan yesterday, and still no storage solution in sight), but some WiiWare games are already advertising paid DLC, and Activision have DLC planned for GH3 Wii. Low storage space might make things difficult for the user, but not impossible. The fault lies squarely with Harmonix and MTV in their rush to cover their first baffling mistake.
How can the storage problem be mitigated? Can you hook up a 150 GB flash drive to your Wii?
It’s not necessary for Nintendo to be the king dog to keep making products. The N64 and Gamecube both turned in lackluster performances, but because Nintendo handles their money much more wisely than Sony or Microsoft, they’re never going to be kicked out of the game entirely. They had enough money to develop the Wii and the DS even when the Playstation was king of the hill for so long, after all.
The Wii has both SD card slots and USB ports. SD cards can at the moment be used to backup VC games, but not run them. Some games allow you to play MP3s from the SD card, and you can edit and view pictures from an SD card in the Photo channel. It will be interesting to see if Guitar Hero 3 can run its DLC from SD cards. The only use for the USB ports at the moment is for a keyboard, and charging controllers with third party chargers.
With the amount of downloadable content already available through the Virtual Console, and the original content coming with Wiiware, not being able to run games from external storage is very limiting. Being able to run games straight from SD cards or an external USB drive would be ideal. I’d be happy with an overpriced Nintendo branded proprietary USB drive. The only thing we’ve had from Nintendo though is “the Wii is like a fridge, when it gets full you take things out.” Yeah, thanks for that.
You’re right, (Mighty Mighty) Bosstone. I don’t see them “being kicked out of the game” at all. I just think they could do even better, and make even more money, if they’d step up and play the game (pardon the pun) for real.
Let me start this by saying: I’ve never played Rock Band or a game online. I can see wanting to play World of Warcraft or a classic “shoot all enemies you can see” game online, but I don’t understand how Rock Band would work being played online.
Come on dopers, fight my ignorance. I’m just not getting it right now.
It could be argued that Nintendo is the only company to step up and play the game so far. Sony and MS were so worried about fighting with each other that they let the Wii completely blow them out of the water in sales.
As far as I’m concerned, the “console war” is over. The Wii will stay in first, the Xbox 360 will be in second and the PS3 will be in third.
The only things left to be shaken out are the percentage of the market each console will own and where development dollars will go now.
One person plays the guitar, one plays the bass, one sings on the mic and one plays the drums. I don’t understand it either, but people seem to enjoy it.
With the Wii’s fanbase focused on in-the-living-room multiplayer, I don’t think the lack of online will hurt Rock Band for the Wii at all.
I disagree, based on longevity and use. Look at how many consoles the PS2 has sold. It’s at, what?, 41 million in the US? 120 milllion worldwide? And it sold almost 4 million last year. I just can’t envision the Wii having that kind of staying power, especially with the lack of games with online play. Sure, it’s cheaper, and fun, for a little while, but I can’t imagine that it will still be selling 4 million a year in 5 years. Maybe I’m wrong.
I bought Rock Band for the PS2. I really couldn’t care less about the online play, I prefer playing with my family and friends. The thing that hurts is the downloadable content.
Stupid decision making? Seriously?!
I’m a pretty big Wii fan, but I’m a much bigger Harmonix fan. Even setting aside those allegiances, just looking at the quality of games released for the next-gen systems makes it pretty clear that the Wii simply isn’t capable of as much. Guitar Hero may have (spotty) online play, but they haven’t worked out the DLC yet, to my knowledge. Nintendo’s working on their WiiWare channel for bite-sized games, but no plans to support third-party downloadable stuff, so it’d all be publisher cost to add those features, which Harmonix/EA probably doesn’t see as worth it.
It would be pretty cool to use your Miis on Rock Band tho, right? Oh, too bad Nintendo only allows in-house games access to them.
Face it - the Wii is a great system, but Nintendo is way too in love with their own first-party strength. WiiWare itself is practically an afterthought, a response to the success of XBL Arcade and PSN games. It’s hard to imagine Nintendo making it as easy as the other big two platform holders… and to hear third parties tell it, it’s not very easy there, either. (Read: tons of red tape for most every downloadable byte.)
And, from a technical standpoint, the PS2 should be able to to DLC as well. Harmonix’ second big game, Amplitude, featured user-made remixes of the in-game tracks that could be saved to the 8MB memory cards, and there’s an HDD add-on as well. The Wii, by contrast, has 512 MB of accessible memory. Nintendo, due to a paranoid fear of pirates, won’t allow users to run virtual console games off of secure approved SD cards, so I doubt they’d let third party publishers use external drives to stream content.
Let’s also not forget that there are plenty of PS2 games which have been ported to Wii in the past year or so. Technologically, the two systems are pretty close as of now. There’s no reason to think Harmonix/EA should sink the extra millions into making the Wii version run ahead of its currently developed levels, graphically and logically.
Again, I love the Wii as much as the next gamer, but it’s hard to reasonably expect, at this point, the same performance as a 360 or PS3 version of a game. The multi-channel stereo sound is just one aspect - you’ve also got the graphics, stage and fan rendering, and dynamic performances by the player avatars. Where in that do you save some RAM and processor cycles for online play?
Then again, I’m someone who values the custom avatars much more highly than the DLC. 
Neither of which were on the PS2 version. But then, why would die-hard Wii owners know how to sing ‘Still Alive,’ anyway?
Online play is extremely overrated by a good portion of forumgoing gamers. The vast majority of people don’t give a crap about online play.
And that’s even ignoring the fact that the Wii has online play. Sure it’s not as good as the Xbox 360 or even the PS3’s, but if online play becomes a requirement, the Wii will be there.
Finally, considering the Wii hasn’t even stopped selling out each shipment yet, I think 100 million is a lowball figure and 150 million is not out of the realm of possibility.
Worldwide I think PS3 will beat the 360 for second place. It will be closer in the US, but it has a chance there too.
It may not beat the PS2, but it will beat its contemporaries. There is more differentiation between the consoles this generation, so it wouldn’t suprise me to see a stronger showing from second and third this time around, which can only be a good thing. The DS may beat the PS2 though, depending on how long they go before releasing a successor. It’s already ahead in Japan.
There are indeed plans. The Square-Enix Wiiware game is advertised as having DLC in the Wiiware channel. The content itself is not available yet as the game has only been out for one day, but the option is available through the Wiiware channel.
Incorrect. EA’s Fifa 08 has Mii integration, and has been out for many months. The developer tools were late in coming, but they got there. Mii support is missing from Rock Band Wii because it is a quick port job, not because Nintendo are preventing it.
I don’t know about the “vast majority”. I think it may be a majority, but with the advent of downloadable content and the demos and the things that being online and having online play can offer, that majority may be shrinking.
Doomed to be unsustainable for any extended period of time due to poor software and poor support outside of Nintendo. This year every grandma that has been wanting a Wii for Wii Sports will have it and the consoles will stop selling like hotcakes. Then it will come down to software and the Wii will collect dust like the GC and N64 before it. Both of those systems had decent runs for the first 24 months or so and then died off as the Xbox and PS2 buried them.
Before bagging on Harmonix too much over this, I’d want to know if the Wii is even capable of playing Rock Band online. You’ve got real-time data passing back and forth for four channels, you’re running multi-channel 5.1 sound, processing Dolby, rendering the stage with custom characters (much more hardware intensive than Guitar Heros’ rendering), displaying four note boards without jitter or stuttering, and God knows what else. It may be that they just couldn’t get the Wii to handle all that without running into performance issues.
And there’s no way you can have downloadable content until the Wii gets a hard drive or really big flash drives. The DLC is just too large. Harmonix plans to release several hundred songs this year. At 30mb each, that’s maybe 10GB of songs. I’m already over several GB, and I haven’t bought half the stuff that’s already been released.
And it’s possible that Nintendo won’t allow DLC on removable memory. Game saves are one thing - you can’t steal a game save.
I accept that the DLC could be slow in coming because the Wii has real space limitations.
But the multiplayer is very possible. Games out right now are managing just fine. Smash Bros. Brawl can get four people playing together, real time, no lag. The graphics are at least as busy as Rock Band’s. I may have to give you the point on audio, because I really don’t know how much power it’d take to pump it out in 5.1, but for the sake of online multiplayer, I’d gladly take a “stereo in online mode” disclaimer. At least it’s not GH3’s mono.
I really don’t think any of those are reasonable assumptions to make about a system that is selling faster than any system has ever sold before.
I would also question why you think Wii software won’t sell. Do I have to repeat the first week sales figures that Super Smash Bros Brawl achieved?
No kidding. Not only that, but Brawl caused huge accessories sales. I’ve been trying to find a nunchuck controller around here and they simply don’t exist. Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Toys r Us, they laugh when I even ask about them. I finally had to resort to getting someone out of town to buy me one.
Apparently first and second party titles just aren’t enough. If you don’t have decent third party software, you’re a failure.
I do think there could be more effort on developers’ parts to turn out good Wii games, because if they did more than cheapass ports they could sell like Brawl. But it’s not going to destroy the system if it’s 75% Zelda and Mario and Metroid, because those are still some of the best game franchises out there.