You are not mentioning that every single Call of Duty game on the Wii has sold over 1 million units (Infinity Ward refused to make Modern Warfare 2 for the Wii). It’s not as many as the HD versions, but if you read IGN and neogaf, you’d think that people like this guy don’t even exist:
They’re there; they’re just treated as second-class citizens by Nintendo and third party alike. Come to think of it, every Wii gamer is treated as a second-class citizen by publishers. No matter what kind of games you like for your Wii, there’s some developer telling you that you can go screw yourself, because they don’t like making games for you (Treyarch being an obvious exception, as they are always very proud of what they do with the Wii version of Call of Duty).
It is second-class gamer, NOT second-class citizen. This issue is not political.
Yes, the Modern Warfare games sold a million or two on the Wii. The ‘hardcore’ were already on the Wii. Wii did have huge third party support.
The following are Nintendo’s own charts presented at the Investor Question and Answer around February 2010 (it is quite recent):
Wii had the strongest software sales in America according to the above chart.
“But what about the third party companies!?” screams the hardcore gamer.
OK…
Wii has the strongest third party sales in the United States.
“But Malstrom, those are sales numbers. Not the number of titles available!” Very well, Mr. Hardcore. Take a look at this…
“See! See!” screams the hardcore gamer with his nasal voice. “Despite having more titles available, PS3 and Xbox 360 sold more third party software.”
Not when you remove Modern Warfare 2 from the picture.
Wii U isn’t interested in the ‘hardcore gamer’. It is actually only interested in the ‘Modern Warfare’ gamer. But why on earth would such a gamer play the game on the Wii U? For the touchscreen on the controller? For the ‘publisher controlled online’? Yeah, this won’t turn out well. Daddy is going to play Modern Warfare on his Microsoft or Sony machine on the big TV and let the child play his kiddy games on the Wii U controller. This is what will happen.
Two reasons why Nintendo is going this route…
1) Economy will be so bad in the near future that Nintendo is taking a defensive approach.
2) Developers run amuck.
If the first possibility was remotely true, Nintendo wouldn’t have gone the expensive 3DS route. So that leaves us with the second possibility: that Nintendo developers are selfish and out of control. Iwata refuses to discipline them because he is a developer himself and is acting as an enabler for this bad behavior.