I heartily disagree. What's good for the consumer is good for us. These lower-budget, mass market games have a lower price point and don't need the $5M to $10M marketing effort. Go Nintendo! Ignore those low ratings. They come from hard-core gamer journalists who evidently like spending $60 a game. They are not in touch with the market that the Wii has tapped into.

Yeah, because everyone loves shovelware!

I don't find that the glut of terrible movies or books released each month prevent me from finding and enjoying those which fit my tastes, despite never looking at related magazines, websites or forums. Usually if my friends mention something they've enjoyed, though, I'll give that a try.

In that light, I think it would be fairly arrogant for me to assume that 'new' game consumers wouldn't be able to sort through the rubbish in order to find the games they want. Especially considering the power of word-of-mouth in our industry.

This 'glut' (or 'busy release schedule') strikes me as more of a potential concern for retailers: retail buyers will need to be smarter, to avoid losing trade to the stores which get it right.

Beware the fate of the Atari! 5 million ET cartridges buried in New Mexico.

Rhodri has good points, especially regarding retailers. Retailers typically devote far more space to toys than video games, yet the market sizes are the same (around US$20 billion in 2008).

Retailers also need to recognize that they have a double-standard between toys and video games. Retail expects toys to have a "long tail" for sales versus time, but retail expects video games to be hit-driven by AAA titles. However, the so-called "budget games" are outselling the AAA games in terms of unit sales because of "long tail" sales numbers. If video games can sell more units in a smaller amount of space, but earn similar revenue to toys, then retailers should adjust their store layouts to maximize profits and allow for higher unit turnover, especially since the toy market has been shrinking over the past three years.

(Disclaimer: although I am using publicly available revenue figures for the toy and video game industries, I could not find publicly available information on profit-per-unit comparisons between toys and video games. Even though the revenue figures are similar, profit-per-unit is probably the more important value for a retailer. If profit-per-unit still favors toys, then my point is largely nullified.)

@Jason: dumping happens even with big-budget games, though, such as (most recently) Haze or Tabula Rasa. It hasn't killed their platforms.

Considering the Wii seems to have gladly ignored mature and adult gamers by releasing endless family and casual material, this is very very true. Nintendo will shoot themselves in the foot once the PS3 and XBox show a softer side to coax parents and casuals into spending money on them and Nintendo will lose that market. They already lost a lot of the hardcore market every since the PS2 came out and even more people thanks to XbOx and Halo.

Nintendo needs to remember the hardcore, adult, and mature gamers again. It's depressing that they come out with the best innovations and best first party games (which in and of themselves are still family oriented) but wind up with lackluster support for anything that would interest a true gamer older than 15.

It's a sad truth when the Wii's best game was a launch title originally meant for the Cube...

Budget titles are essential for any entertainment medium. Developers are allowed to experiment with less pressure, Publishers and Retailers can turn a profit quicker, consumers are satisfied with the varied selection, and the industry may uncover new markets in the process (e.g. Deer Hunter).

So don't ask game developers to stop making budget titles (for any console, not just Wii). If anyone is going to become disenchanted by a game glut, it will be the consumer towards the retailer who doesn't have their game in stock.

Daniel, what?

Your comments make me think that you're from the Playstation generation and that you've bought into MS's and Sony's hardcore-indoctrination this past decade -- they've brainwashed an entire generation with this FUD.

Seriously, you're being naive.

It's interesting to see how this suggestion has polarised people.

For me, a high volume of budget titles is liable to be a bad thing, both for developers and for gamers.

First, it leads to a higher level of churn in bricks-and-mortar stores, where there's limited display space. This then leads to a scramble for first-day sales and significantly higher promotional costs.

Secondly, a large choice is only good when the buyer is able to make an informed purchase. This isn't easily achievable in physical stores, where marketing propaganda is generally the only information available (and in truth, XBLA, WiiWare and PSN all suffer from the same issue). "Casual" Joe Sixpack isn't likely to know the difference between Jenga World Tour and Boom Blox, so price rather than quality is likely to be the deciding factor.

Thirdly, shovelware games are generally less satisfying than the higher-priced equivalents, which can (and has) led to the perception that the Wii has very few quality games available.

Fourthly, publishers may decided to avoid releasing high-value titles, given the risk of failure caused by the factors above[*]. The market then runs the risk of cycling downward into a world consisting purely of low-budget, low-revenue, low-entertainment titles, which then implodes under the weight of it's own ineffectiveness.

This may be slightly alarmist, but there are precedents - the video game crash in the 1980s was driven in part by a glut of low-quality titles. A similar issue occurred in the UK in the early 90s: a key weapon in the war between rival 8-bit magazines was to stick several older full-price games onto the front cover as "freebies". These "budget" releases (5 or 6 games + a magazine for less than the cost of a new game) were eventually recognised as having seriously damaged the retail games market and hastening the death of the systems on which the magazines relied. A gentleman's agreement was agreed on for the 16-bit era, in which only demos would be included on the coverdisks.

There's also plenty of precedents outside the video game industry as well: in any mature market, price generally becomes the deciding factor and manufacturers are forced to either pull out altogether or reduce quality in a bid to stay competitive. It's debatable as to whether this is a good thing or not, but personally I like having the option to spend a bit more and get something which will last longer or work more effectively!

OTOH, I'm not sure if it's something Nintendo are likely to care about: the Wii market is very clearly driven by first-party products and the royalties they receive from third-party budget titles are probably pretty much the same as from a high-quality title. At present, they don't really have an incentive to tighten up on quality!

[*] I've seen a quote from an analyst which states that 300'000 sales are needed for a $5 million production to break even. According to VGChartz (which may not be reliable, but should be indicative), over 80% of Wii games have not reached this level.

Admittedly, the vast majority will have been produced for far less than $5m, but scanning through the sub-300k list, I can see games like Spyro, Cars, SSX Blur, Bleach, Harry Potter, Medal of Honour, Manhunt 2, Naruto, Soul Caliber, Mortal Kombat and Alone in the Dark: these are big-name games from big-name labels, and sales figures like this wouldn't make me want to come back for a second bite at the cherry...

Another games crash isn't out of the question with the Wii. I bought a Wii, toyed around with it for a while, and now it's gathering dust. Statistics show that I'm not the only one.

The Wii's attach rate is pretty poor, and all the titles that do sell are Nintendo's. 3rd party devs need to put more emphasis on quality to stand out of the crowd.

I think that shovelware is REALLY harmfull, and few people are noticing that because they do not see what I see...

First, here on Brazil there was some cool magazines that sold games for 8 USD, soon there was a boom of those magazines, that instead of selling good games like Total Annihilation (yeah, I have a 8 USD Total Annihilation! Awesome game!), they started to sell shovelware like mad...

Now everyone is bankrupting but the single company that insisted in never selling shovelware, thus never damaging their image with the costumers, for example the last magazines that they launched with 8 USD games were Sands Of Time, Splinter Cell, Age Of Empires I + II + Expansiosn of both + Soundtrack in MP3, Ground Control II and other good games...



The other problem of shovelware is that it generates a HUGE amount of piracy... I asked several people that buy ONLY pirated games, why they do it...

Most common awnser: Because 10 USD is what they are worth in maximum (the price of a pirated game here, noone download pirated games for "free" because broadband here is a rarity).

Then I said: But that way you drive game makers out of business!

Awnser: Bullshit! There are always new Matrix, Batman and other crappy games like that coming out, I know that they give profit even being shit, and I know that companies can use that money to do better games like Rainbow Six Vegas that I buy pirated anyway...

Altough it may seen illogical this argument, I noticed a pattern: Most of people that had pirated software do not had some titles, they had ALL shovelware titles that they could get, all them complain of how much bad games exist and how much they need to search to find a single good game (and search is buyign a game, playing, and if it is bad, buy another one and repeat).

The only games that I see people here buying original are /sometimes/ (not always) the FIFA series and Winning Eleven (in fact, the game here is sold as PES but everyone bought it before PES was sold officially here pirated from a copy of Winning Eleven, so now PES is called Winning Eleven locally here, and some people even prefer to hack PES to make it look like Winning Eleven again with japanese people speaking and whatnot...)


So, Shovelware do cause a great damage to the market, people simply believe that games are not hard to do, not costly and that they can get pirated or not get them at all that those companies will not care.