Nintendo releases third-party sales chart, NPD clarifies some details

I was telling all the time that you would get impression that 3rd party games do not sell on Wii only by reading blogs like Joystiq and WiiFanboy.

Fortunately normal people shopping for Wii games do not read the blogs.

Attach rates is only useful when the consoles have comparable amount of hardware install base, for example, comparing the attach rate of the 360 and PS3 is good, but the Wii, because the Wii has almost the double of install base.

By that logic, God of War II is an epic failure in sales, because it only sold 2 million with an install base of 120 million.

First off, some of you people need to realize Wii Play is a first party effort, so for all you people that keep bringing up that it's upsetting this graph you're wrong, this is only third parties.

Second, like said before the sales for an average game on Wii is expected to be less. Know why? Because they didn't invest nearly as much money developing the title as a PS3 or 360 title. So yea, No More Heroes was a huge success to Ubisoft. If that game out on the 360 instead and got those same sales numbers, it would have cost the company money, not gained them.

Lastly, I think it's funny how much people care about these charts here. Why can't you all be content that you have three awesome consoles to play with, and that they are all doing great, giving you a ton of games to experience. When I was growing up with the NES, the law of the world was that one company did really well, while the other company suffocated (gameboy vs gamegear, nes vs master system etc). So be happy that Nintendo is doing well. What do you people own stock in the other two companies or what? Buy all three, there's fun to be had with them all.

But if you move the 360 chart over 1 year since it came out a year earlier, you can see 3rd parties are selling a lot more on 360 right now than on Wii.

Can someone explain to me why the graph shows 30 million sold for the Wii in the first 18 months and the text after it says 60 million sold in the first 18 months?

So given that we know that No More Heroes and Bloom Blox make up a very tiny percentage of all these Wii 3rd party sales, what the hell is accounting for all those sales?

Seems to me like this chart should be titled something like "Wii Users: The only group dumb enough to buy 30 million units of software titles that you haven't even heard of".

Metacritic only has 1 Wii 3rd party game with a score over 90, and only 10 with a score over 80 (most of which sold pretty poorly). So what the heck are these people buying?

"The perception that they don't is probably bla bla bla"



Fantards. That's all it is. Butthurt fucking fantards.

I'm confused???

Does XBOX360 has first party development??? I though Halo would be considered third party cuz its bungie, or bungie is just a second party developers for the 360???

Yeah, that chart at the bottom is nice. One question: Why'd you only list 360 third party sales? You seem so proud of your ability to put a dot on a graph, now lets finish the job here before you declare yourself the winner

Flooding their market with last gen games.

Would somebody mind telling me what everyone is arguing about?

The statement was 'Third-Party games don't sell of the Wii'.

This chart proves that statement to be incorrect.

End of.

What interests me is what happened during months 13-16 that brought its third party games up.... Also these people who buy these third party games could also be parents or friends of adults that think their little kids would like Kung Fu Panda as a Birthday present, I don't know if that is always true but the reason why the Wii is selling these games is because TV show games and Movie games sell on the wii (Since sadly, they are aiming torward the younger children of the market), Don't get me wrong I like Nintendo, but this whole third party complaint fest you guys are having with one another is totally irrelavant, yes Nintendo has the highest in sells(Which it says on the chart at the moment) But remember that people are buying Wiis like hotcakes, causing more and more parents to think that the latest sonic, avatar, Kung Fu Panda, Iron Man, whatever should be great for kids, all us fanboys, gamers, whatever(including not playing parents), should just be worried about two things in third party games... 1) Do I like it? 2) Will anyone else like it(If you are giving it as a present of course).

I don't give a damn what charts you show, all the best third party games are on 360 and PS3...

This chart is so unfriendly to the color blind.

Seriously.

Anyone else a bit disturbed by the fact that the ps3 and the wii are using the same time frame but the xbox360 is using an entirely different time frame that has more than a years difference in it?

I would think you would want to make comparisons based on the same time frame. Frankly this smacks of huge bias in someones favor. I've no idea who to be frank but this whole article reeks of PR spin to me.

So how about meaningful comparisons rather than statistics that are obviously biased?

Via VGChartz.com, 3rd party Wii games that have sold over a million copies:

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Sega 5.21m
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Activision 3.06m
Carnival Games, Take 2 1.89m
Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sega 1.69m
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, Capcom 1.47m
Rayman Raving Rabbids, Ubisoft 1.36m
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, LucasArts 1.33m
Rayman Raving Rabbids 2, Ubisoft 1.27m
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Capcom 1.25m
MySims, Electronic Arts 1.17m
Game Party, Midway 1.16m
Red Steel, Ubisoft 1.06m

So can we shut up about Carnival Games making up a majority of the 3rd party sales now? And while mini-games will always be prevalent on the system they don't even make up half of the games on this list(even if you argue that Mario and Sonic isn't a sports game but falls into the mini-games genre as well).

And some articles on dev costs -

Wii is only 25% of what a PS3 or 360 game costs to make:
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=1055

500,000 PS3 games required to sell to make a profit
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/66612

A forum thread that breaks down dev costs between systems trying to hammer out the average cost:
http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=960

Red Steel seems to be at the high end of development costs for the Wii at 12m. With it being agreed upon that the PS3 and 360 average around 20m in development costs.

Which would make sense if you were to believe that the average take home per PS3/360 game were $40 and that it takes at least half a million units sold to turn a profit(which equals 20m).

Now if the same information from that forum thread is to be believed then the average take home from a Wii game is $30. And as various reports say Wii dev costs are anywhere from half to a quarter of what a PS3 or 360 game costs then I'll go with a third for arguments' sake and round to 6.7m. That equals 223,333 units to start turning a profit so what the hell lets make it a nice even 224,000 units.

Using those numbers and going back to VGChartz we get this many 3rd party games per console that have been successful:

Wii: 66
PS3: 24
360: 70

I'm not saying these numbers are completely accurate and it is based on average costs vs. actual costs but it does help get things into perspective. Overall I'm surprised by the PS3's performance so far.

If you disagree then put up your own numbers and some links.