Capcom: Less Wii After Darkside Chronicles Sells Only 16k

If only they'd produced a decent non-linear worthwhile game, instead of palming Wii owners off with something worse than Resident Evil 5, and that was pretty bad if we're all being honest... They might as well have called it Resident Evil Volcanoe Chronicles. If the Wii falls, once again, like the Gamecube, it's down to the inability to produce imaginative games of quality with a simple technical constraint. They all managed it when the PS2 was the weakest console around, so what's there excuse now?

No Capcom,

It's the fact that you have been releasing a lot of crap games and half assed ports that has made people weary of buying any of your games!

Crap ports? Resi 5 was great. The fact is only jumping about games do well on the Wii now as that's what it's known for. I have just sold mine as nothing on it is worth the play time imo.
I'm playing Borderlands at the mo and it's fantastic. My taste in games in well catered for on PS3. I like to relax when playing, not flap about. Wii's console sales don't reflect in games sales, well harcore games.
I'm no fanboy but EA said it and now Capcom and others. The Gamecube was great but just fell away.
I see the Wii shelves FULL of flap about games and games to loose the fat. Oh yes!

@Kris the man *admits* that you must make a huge marketing spend to have success on Wii and you turn around and blame the audience!

So here's a plan for Capcom et al: since you save obscene sums developing on Wii and do not have guaranteed hits on PS360 (hello massive flop that is Bionic Commando): take that money you save in dev costs and SPEND IT ON MARKETING YOUR GAMES!! I know, crazy talk, right!

As is the case on PS360 you cannot simply dump a game on the market (again, see BIonic Commando) and just hope it sells by virtue of the size of the userbase. Why Wii is relentlessly dinged for this (see EA again where they spent ZERO dollars marketing Dead Space Extraction and are shocked(!) that it sold poorly because none of that *massive* audience knew it existed) while they don't take a good, hard, look at other consoles in hilarious. (They even blamed Bionic Commando on it being from a Western dev! Even though it was a very solid game!)

The fact is, companies want easy money on Wii, period. That is their goal. They do not want to spend much money on developing the games (this is agonizingly obvious), do not want to spend any money marketing them (outside of Nintendo, does anyone spend any money marketing on WIi??) and yet then turn around and expect them to sell by the boatload!

Guess what? Even someone w/ an MBA from Caribbean Uni could tell you that this is a recipe for failure, especially when you need to stand out in the crowd on Wii where there are simply tons and tons and tons of games.

The real issue with the Wii is this. I wanted to buy Resident Evil Darkside Chronicles, but of course owning a PS3, I feel that the Wii games are way overpriced. I don't see the value of this game being worth $50 and Nintendo knows this. Wii games at most should be $34.99 and on average $29.99.

On the contrast, with games like Uncharted 2, I totally feel that each game is worth $59.99 and possibly more.

To be honest I haven't bought a Wii game for myself since Super Smash Brothers Brawl, one of the few games I actually think was worth $50. Capcom is my favorite 3rd party publisher, but I am sorry that I could not come with the extra $50 to buy this game, even if it rated above a 9.

I think Capcom are right, and like EA before them, now realise that the hardcore base has left Wii, just a shame it took them so long to wake up to it. While I agree that the RE and EA's Dead Space Wii games should have been more like their original counterparts, I feel the reason they didn't end up this way, is because the whispers of Wii burnout, would have been circling the plug hole, around the time those games started development, if not before. Think how much they might have lost if they had committed to such games, as even hardcore sales on Wii aren't guaranteed.

Every company is different, and with such whispers, as well as previous solid titles failing,, I don't blame them. Zack and Wiki was an awesome, original game, launched early in the Wii life, had good advertising and the hardcore still didn't buy it. Can you blame Capcom, for not wanting to tread this same water again on Wii, after following with four RE games (RE4 and 0 ported from GC), Dead Rising and Okami (there's still a Wii Phoenix Wright game in the pipe)? Capcom have had a fair shot at Wii, more than most developers would dare to. They would be better winding down Wii developemnt, to focus on 360/PS3/PC as their core market with handhelds as extras.

How will this sit with third parties? I think from now on, many of them will dodge Nintendo home formats, until they get a tangible enough system with specs they can work with, and not get fleeced on media. Nintendo are still at the core of this problem, as its they who gimped the Wii so much, that few developers want to touch it. Kudos to those that try hard with Wii, but overall its a fruitless exercise. The games that tried and failed litter the roadside. Its also Nintendo's lack of quality control that allowed so much dross to flood Wii. I know some will use the PS2 comparison, tha it had a same problem, but that is different and from a time when online gaming and demos, etc, wasn't as prevalent, and PS2 had man years to iron its carefully Sony controlled library out.

Its like they say, I guess, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is so true as far as WIi is concerned, and exactly why I opted for a 360 instead.

I agree with the comments above.

If Capcom made an original game like Resi 4 on Gamecube for Wii then maybe they'd get some sales. Why could they not use that engine for a proper new Resi game on Wii?

Instead they just make crappy on rails shooters and a remake of an old game, what do they expect? Now they assume that there is no market for it. T**ts

I totally disagree. I just finished playing one of the best games I've played for awhile and it's on the Wii. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is awesome! Sure, it's a very different turn from the original game, but they pulled it off incredibly well.

And what about Metroid: Other M later this year?

Did the "opportunity for 'hardcore' games" ever exist on Wii? I don't think so

You really suck at analyzing don't you... First, define "the hardcore gamer". No really, define it. I'll give you a head-start, YOU CAN'T!. Why? Because any type of definition will exclude some type of person that will consider(ed) himself a hardcore gamer. The Wii-audience is full of old hardcore gamers (mainly the Atari generation and the 8-bit/16-bit generations). Some call them "former" hardcore gamers... but are they really...If they perform a action with their action input device...does their main character not move...If they...yeah not doing this.

Yes they are...depending on what you call a hardcore game...I mean, I don't call Halo a hardcore game and I have many a PC "hardcore" gamers agreeing with me...And really, Wii whispers of Wii Burnout? It's not because some third parties, pretend hardcore gamers as yourself and market analysts believe in this near self-fullfilling prophecy that it will actually happen (You hear that Huntington!). Sales of hardcore games are also not garanteed on the other two systems, even moreso then on the Wii, because of much and much higher development costs.


Agree on first, not really on second (was a third generation Wii-game) and did not at all receive any kind of marketing (campaigns by IGN don't count, they started that themselves, not because Capcom payed them) and the game still sold 250 000 copies in the US alone. For a overly cutsey niche-genre title...that's a lot.

RE4 Wii sold more then a million copies...for a port...of a game that allready payed it's development many times over...The HUGE RISK!!!! The Dead Rising port was bad...you get bad sales for a bad game...woad, Who would have thaught! Okami Wii sold more then Okami PS2, again proving that owners of Nintendo platforms are in fact more receptive for arty games then the Xbox/Playstation crowd (incidently, Killer 7, Viewtifull Joe and No More Heroes HD have allready proven this or will prove it again).


God you're shortsighted...you really want this industry to crash and burn? So you want Capcom to take even bigger risks on higher cost platforms while ignoring the market leader of consoles who is cheaper and only consider the Playstation 2 of this generation (the DS) as an simple extra? Do not ever, ever run a company, EVER! I Capcom can't figure out new market conditions then by the laws of free market it deserves to die...end of story. Not Nintendo's fault, their fault.


God by that logic, Everyone should avoid handhelds at all...problem is...the handheld market has always been the unseen financial bloodstream of this entire industry, it get cut, the industry dies, Thank you oh wise Joji...The Wii is a prevalent enough machine to do any kind of "gaming" developers can trow at it. The real problem is is that developers don't want to do gaming of fun, they want to chase after Hollywood and be serious...douchbags. It's that last bit that will cause this industry to implode, well only the part that believes in the chasing Hollywood bit will implode, the Wii-disruption followers will just continue to keep growing.


As it always have been...Remember that one interview with a Rare-guy when Viva Pinata sold 500 000 copies and he said that made the game break-even and how that puts them into the rare 40% of the games that actually get to be break-even on HD-consoles...yeah that means 60% of all HD-games fail as well...Way to be jaded by the already jaded gaming press that only focuses on successes of their "hardcore" HD-systems and only focus on the failures of the system that is literally making them useless.


Oh god not this retarded argument again. Nintendo's quality control has always been to that extent that the software doesn't kill the hardware (Microsoft can learn from that, my mate doesn't dare buying new games in fear it will brick his 360). Demo's have NO impact on sales, online demo's have NO impact on sales (except bad ones)...this has been proven, you believing otherwise will not change the fabric of reality in making it so. And Sony's "controlled library) consisted of checking if the game was in 3D, if it wasn't, it would not be approved. Sony actually almost succeeded in killing 2D-gaming the late 90's...Thank god they found a home on handhelds...now who owns the handheld market again...oh yeah...


So the road the industry should take is the one of shoddy quality control, hidden costs in online content, higher prices for games, much higher costs in development and no promise of growth at all. I knew it you're anarchist, you just want the industry to burn, there is no other explanation for you trowing all kind of logic out of the window.

You mention Okami without mentioning it sold better than the PlayStation 2 version?

You mention Monster Hunter 3 just about its development and not that it sold great in Japan, being the highest selling home console third party game of the generation across all platforms up until Final Fantasy XIII's release? It didn't sell as good as the portable versions, but on the other hand it provides additional income through the online fees, and did many times better than the PlayStation 2 titles.

What are you trying to pull here mister?

Darkside Chronicles doesn't sell because Umbrella Chronicles was supposed to be a test game. The test was succesful and instead of leading to proper CAPCOM support we got another outsouced lightgun game. Of course it doesn't sell, despite being pretty.

Hantzopoulos doesn't know what he's talking about. MadWorld and The Conduit wouldn't have sold better anywhere (does Rogue Warrior sell on 360? Did GodHand sell on PlayStation 2?), while Overkill sold great for what it is, especially if as himself said the sales are 30% higher than reported. These games are cheap as f**k sub par efforts, why would anyone expect them to sell as much as the highly polished and well marketed titles like something Nintendo puts out, or even some of the same companies put out on other systems?

You gotta spend money to make money, so if you make poor outsourced efforts or put your interns on the job expect sales that reflect that.

Please show some journalistic integrity with your comments Spong, don't just allow random employees to feed you whatever bullshit they like and have you run with it to take their points above and beyond what even they said.

Hell, Hantzopoulos said the litmus test was Dead Space Extraction. Lol? The genre was dead pre-Wii folks. The genre is STILL dead on the 360 and PS3. That Wii managed to revive the genre, even for a short time, is a testament to its great selling power. Companies tried to milk it too much, and that is their own fault. The lightgun bubble has burst, so stop making them. That doesn't mean anything negative about the Wii, only about the way companies like that handle development. Why is a genre that's DEAD on other systems the Wii's litmus test?

And no so called journalist brought that up at all. So much for critical thinking. And lol @ using google translate and trying to pull facts from it. You're a joke.

create games Like RE4 If you would like to sell games on the wii. No one was intressted in the rail shooter from the beginning. Just look at the other railshooter that was released on the PS2 (im speaking of the Resident evil titles of course) while gamecube got the real ones. If you take that statistics the playstation would't get the RE5.

PLEASE Do not try to make a quick buck on us. We know better then that.

Give us a real AAA title of RE frenshice.

Your light gun shooters don't appeal to the hardcore Capcom. Do something like Resident Evil 4 or proper remakes of RE2 and RE3 like you did for RE1 on the gamecube. Try that first! And if those don't sell, then complain! You didn't make hardcore games on the Wii, you made compromised games in an attempt to appeal to hardcore and casual under the name of a hardcore branded franchise. You've only yourself to blame. Either focus on one market or don't bother. Trying to please everyone pleases no one.

Capcom is not listening to the consumer. The consumer don't want any more railshooters for the wii, that is and was crystal clear and Sega's Madworld was just too short. I think there are still wii hardcorefans and Monster Hunter 3 will sell very good cus it is a real quality game.

Oh and to add to my last post (first on this page), some French schmuck doesn't count as "CAPCOM" as he probably has no say whatsoever in any big decisions, such as game development. Duh.