Here’s some interesting news: sixty-seven percent of Wii owners aren’t playing with their Wii right now, according to a report published by Japanese Famitsu publisher, Enterbrain. We don’t blame them.

Far from defending Nintendo to the hilt, we perfectly understand why that would be so. For starters, summer’s been a pretty awful time for Wii games. Poorly implemented PS2 and PSP ports, and a long gap between big-name Nintendo releases hasn’t helped matters. While the DS seems to get something that plays to its strengths nearly every month, its bigger brother has yet to prove itself. Wii Sports is a brilliant proof of concept game that shows just what the Wii is made for, but nobody has been able to immeasurably improve on the game with a follow-up that would appeal to the mass market.

The fear is that people are beginning to think of the Wii as a fad. All those people who never bought games before are moving on to the next thing. Playing tennis and bowling may get your gran grinning, but she’s honestly not going to progress to Super Mario Galaxy because of a few energetic games. With nothing yet out that becomes a focal point for the casual market - a Brain Training, a Nintendogs… anything - a lot of these ‘non gamers’ are naturally beginning to lose interest.

Then again, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Let’s put it another way. My family own a copy of Trivial Pursuit, bought many years ago, and only ever play at Christmas. The rest of the time it’s stuck in the cupboard doing nothing. For that one merry, drunken time we enjoy ourself in its company, yet we never think of it as a waste of money even if it’s only brought out once a year.

Now that analogy may be slightly off, seeing as how the makers of Trivial Pursuit don’t rely on you buying a new pack of questions every month. Yet it still stands that there’s a time and a place for everything. For one thing, the Wii is going to be taking the place of the board game in a lot of households this Christmas. A lot of eyes will be pointing to it that never would before, and probably never will till the next one.

Secondly, while the serious gamer may think and play games daily, the dabbler will come and go as they please. Maybe they’ll move on to a Sudoku obsession or get addicted to Heroes, and when they do they’ll put the Wii on the back burner until something else comes along that they like. And when that something does, out it comes once again, because the best thing Nintendo could have done is to get it into homes in the first place. Once it’s in there, it’s small and discreet enough to lay dormant for a few months or more before - bam - the next big thing strikes.

Buying a Wii is never really going to convince the masses to go serious and put some quality time into Metroid Prime 3 or Resident Evil 4; that’s wishful thinking on gamers’ parts. That market is just after one or two things tailored to their mainstream needs. Wii Fit looks to solve that gap and let those 67% power up their Wii again, and after that, who knows? Meanwhile, (and this is the slightly more hopeful part of the opinion) those looking for something more traditionally Nintendo should be well-catered once Nintendo finally get going with their next releases and the third parties get to grips with the Wii’s features. So we won’t worry too much that it’s asleep just now. At least it’s there.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 12:04 pm by James Lyon
Columns & Opinion.