THQ Hates Wii, Loves Huffy Bike
What's bound to happen when you get a bunch of game industry bigwigs gathered in one place, like E3? Wii-whining! It doesn't matter if it's a competing console manufacturer begging for some unfavorable comparisons or a third-party developer that never touched a dev kit; everyone just loves complaining about the Wii and its bewildering success.
Today's example comes from Danny Bilson, THQ's Senior Vice President of Creative Development. Sitting down with industrygamers.com, the publishing big shot started good enough by mentioning the obligatory "Wii is different" line...
Well the first thing you have to do is break out of the old model of, 'I'm going to port this game to seven SKUs.' The same game on PS3, Wii, PSP, DS, 360, PS2 and all that crap. That doesn't work anymore, and the reason is, in my opinion, that these platforms are now different cultures - they're almost different gamers.
He was making sense until he used the word "almost," but I'm willing to let that slide. I think that it's pretty obvious to everyone that the average PS360 gamer is looking for different experiences than a heavy PSP user, a Wii user, and so on. But Bilson went for a spin on an adorable Huffy bike as he went on to describe his personal outlook for the Wii specifically...
Here's the deal: there is so much junk on the Wii that if you add up all the numbers of those hundreds of SKUs, I'm sure you can cough up some number that's impressive. If you go to GameStop, and you look at the Wii wall... I went in on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when everything should be fully stocked, I wanted to see what retail looked like. I wasn't even in this state; I was in Florida... you look at the Wii wall and you can't find anything. It's a big conglomeration of junk and the Nintendo stuff pops, and a couple of other things pop, and that's it.
There's so much to talk about here. The hypocrisy of the minds behind Are Your Smarter Than a 5th Grader: Make The Grade and Bratz: Girlz Really Rock complaining that the Wii shelf is a "big conglomeration of junk," Nintendo's ability to succeed in a market that no one else can crack, and THQ's inability to market their own Wii games that could have succeed if they could only figure out how to rally the troops.
After giving THQ's own Deadly Creatures the strongest recommendation that this site allows me to bestow on a game, it's severely disappointing that Bilson would blame the console's audience or GameStop's display shelves for the lack of sales success instead of reexamining their own marketing practices. In my not so humble opinion, publishers looking to capture a Wii audience has to think outside the standard methods to get the word out. Relying on web ads at IGN for a day isn't exactly going to get the results that THQ was/is hoping for. But perhaps there's more to his statements than just the usual Wii bashing we hear so much. Head on over to Industry Gamers to see for yourself.
[Wii is a 'Nightmare' for Third Parties, says THQ exec] IndustryGamers.com
Game-Boy
Posted to Video Games on 2 June 2009
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: deadly creatures, haters, huffy bike, thq, wii
He's absolutely spot on, it's been a disaster for quality has the Wii, it has drastically sped up the dumbing down of gaming as an entire entity.
What an idiot. "Oh booohoo! I don't know how to market games for anything but 30-something males! Nintendo is bad ;_;"
"He's absolutely spot on, it's been a disaster for quality has the Wii, it has drastically sped up the dumbing down of gaming as an entire entity."
I could just as easily make that argument about the PSX and PS2. The popular system ALWAYS has shovel-ware loaded on it. PSX and PS2 is what made gaming mainstream as far as non-nerd males go. They created the stereotypical fratboy "I play games cause it's cool" gamer, and Microsoft's Halo helped grow that, too.
Shovelware is a fact of life and something that every industry leader has enabled (Atari, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and Sony have all helped). I think bringing it up is a moot point and blaming it for weak sales feels disingenuous. What we/he should be talking about is how to rise above the crap and make great games.
You know, I agree with what he said, but his company is hands down the #1 contributor to those crap games. It's unbelievable he could let something that stupid fly from his mouth like he was working at Activision-Blizzard or Epic Games or some developer that actually releases good high quality games.
Well said, Game Boy.
The Game Boy Advance and DS have the similar problem of being overloaded with games that are crap, but that hasn't stopped them from being successful and brilliant systems in their own right. He's just trying to find a reason to whine. I think having a bunch of crappy games is a sign of good times for a system, because it means it's doing so well people are willing to take more chances on it.
the reason why theres not so much shovelware on the PS3 and XBOX is that theyre too damned expensive to develop for. I hate shovelware games, but if people are buying them they'll keep making em.
But despite the crap there are some cracking games too.