I'm surprised you think the PS3 has a higher attach rate! Are there statistics to back this up? With relatively few games on the market and an average price per game of £50, I would expect the PS3 to have a much lower attach rate than the Wii, which has an average price per game of about £20, and a massive selection to choose from.
I actually do remember reading last autumn over at VGChartz (a site that tracks hardware and software sales) that the Wii did indeed have the worst attach rate of all (and they had the figures/sums to prove it - but I can't quite remember the exact article ).
I remember that there were PLENTY of shovelware titles on the PS2....it's just that with the dearth of titles available, they were buried amongst the ok to brilliant ones. It just seems to me that the Wii has a higher overall % of shovelware than the PS2 did.
I think it boils down to 4 things:
Shovelware++ for the Wii.....which doesn't appear to be easing up despite promises of "Oh we'll get better as we learn to fully develop for the new controllers later on".
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As mentioned by Ignatius above, the target audience for a PS3 are gamers. People who will generally buy more games anyway. So regardless of quality, PS3 owners will tend to be gamers who tend to buy more games. Conversely, Wii owners are gamers (= lots of games) but the largest market is definitely the non-gamer (= as mentioned, happy with WiiSports and maybe WarioWare). The higher proportion of traditional non-gamers will bring the overall attach rate down IMO
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As mentioned by CaptainFF, the GREAT titles are sometimes hard to find. It seems that shops don't really care about selling Wii. An example, I walked into my local WHSmith (large 2 floor shop). They've stopped selling Wii hardware and software altogether now . All they have are PS2 and 360 titles with a smattering of PS3 ones. I then looked in PC World today. 2 long shelves with PS2 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor. 2 long shelves with 360 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor. 1 long shelf with PS3 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor...........and half a shelf of Wii titles (NONE of them new) in the corner actually HIDDEN behind a heavy revolving stand containing budget PC games that had been deliberately placed in front of it (too heavy to be lifted by 1 person/customer) . I definitely think that retailers have a lot to answer for too
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Finally also as mentioned by Ignatius, reviewers do definitely appear biased towards the 360 and PS3. The biggest factor is that 90% of them appear to be Graphics-whores and simply cannot get over the fact that the Wii has gone in a different direction. Unfortunately, I don't think they will "grow up" this gen so we will continue to see almost fanboyish 100% Perfect scores for average games like Halo 3, whilst many Wii games continually get down marked for the fact that only their graphics appear to be last gen in comparison (even though in isolation they may look great)....
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IMO, the games are so involving I only need a couple to keep me going - every now and then I'll get back into an old game like super paper mario, but on the whole I'll stick with one or two games til I complete them. Given the pick up and play nature of the wii, this can take a while
Also, I take it this doesn't take into account VC games, which are a drain of wii-owners spending power...
IMO, the games are so involving I only need a couple to keep me going - every now and then I'll get back into an old game like super paper mario, but on the whole I'll stick with one or two games til I complete them. Given the pick up and play nature of the wii, this can take a while
Also, I take it this doesn't take into account VC games, which are a drain of wii-owners spending power...
An excellent point there Ed , I'd completely forgotten about them. I'll go hunting for some VC attach rate info if I can......
VC games sales are dependent on a broadband connection.. .. .. not every house has access to one.. .. .. (and I know of 3 people who own Wiis, have broadband, but still haven't taken it online ) .. ..
Nintendo, prior to the release of the Wii said it wasn’t attempting to capture the hardcore gamer, but was trying to attract those (amongst others!) who didn’t normally play games. I think this could partially explain the attach rate – at one point (I think) that the average Wii owner in Japan had two games and there will be those that find just Wii Sports will keep them amused for six months.
Although there are some excellent titles on the PS3, but more than a few reviewers have gone a little easy in reviewing PS3 games – I’m not convinced that the ‘average’ PS3 game is remarkably high quality, but feel that the perception is.
This one speaks the truth. Really this thread is about judging the Wii and 3rd party support by all that went before it and that's not going to fly because the Wii isn't trying to appeal exclusively to core gamers. This means that 3rd parties who want to sell titles outside of that audience (i.e. people who don't read gaming sites/magazines) will need to market their titles differently.
Likewise Nintendo needs to be better on the QC. They have a locked-down system, presumably not just to stop piracy, but to ensure the content and quality of games being licensed meets some kind of standards (hard to believe based upon some of the rubbish on the system), but I'm not a developer, so I don't know what's actually required to get the "Licensed by Nintendo" message to appear in your game.
Reviewers definitely show a bias when reviewing Wii games. I've seen Marvel Ultimate Alliance slated because the reviewer clearly couldn't get to grips with the controls. There's a lot of people that cannot break out of joypad-mode when playing a game and it comes through in the review. I don't read reviews literally normally, but rather try to get a feel for what the game is and whether it would appeal based upon reviewed content. But execution is also important and when I read a review of Jenga on this site that is very favourable and then a review on IGN which gives it one of the worst ratings of any games going so far as to say the control implementation makes it unplayable, I have to wonder what exactly is going on. It really undermines the credibility of the traditional gaming sites for anything Wii-related outside of interviews or parroting back press releases.
Hopefully as the userbase grows we'll see more specialty publications that cater to different subgroups of Wii users and the traditional mags/sites can just focus exclusively on their niche platforms. Either that or they might try consistently engaging reviewers that actually like the system?
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. All they have are PS2 and 360 titles with a smattering of PS3 ones. I then looked in PC World today. 2 long shelves with PS2 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor. 2 long shelves with 360 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor. 1 long shelf with PS3 titles in a spacious area of the shop floor...........and half a shelf of Wii titles (NONE of them new) in the corner actually HIDDEN behind a heavy revolving stand containing budget PC games that had been deliberately placed in front of it (too heavy to be lifted by 1 person/customer) 
. I definitely think that retailers have a lot to answer for too
, I'd completely forgotten about them. I'll go hunting for some VC attach rate info if I can......
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