How good are Wii game sales?

by Jon Erik Ariza

Posted: 07-08-2009

It seems most are quick to judge the Wii’s sales figures, more than any other platform, but do we expect too much?

Forewarning: the following article is based on sales figures culled from VGChartz. If you are distrustful of VGChartz’ figures or simply do not care for the site, then you might want to consider changing the channel.

Still here? Good, let’s begin.

It’s a well known fact that third party games don’t sell well on the Wii. It’s also well known that mature, or “hardcore”, games don’t sell well on the Wii. After all, Halo 3 has sold nearly 10 million units, Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty 4 have sold nearly 13 million, Gears of War 5 million copies, Metal Gear Solid 4 4 million copies, and Mass Effect 2 million copies. The only games on the Wii that approach those numbers are Nintendo’s own first party titles.

However, let’s think about things for a second. The games I mentioned and Nintendo’s first party titles are all monster sellers, no doubt about it, but are they really representative of game sales as a whole?

I’m of the mind that the industry has, in a sense, been spoiled by overhyped, over-marketed, monster blockbusters like the games I’ve listed, and we seem to believe that these are normal sales figures. The phenomenon is similar to looking at fashion models all the time and expecting a normal woman to look the same. Nowadays, if a game doesn’t sell a million copies in its first week, we consider it a financial bomb. However, what happens if we look at sales figures for the “other” games a little more closely? As a matter of fact, few games released, despite the console, achieve even a million units in sales in the US.

Lower figures are more commonplace

Note: From this point on, I’ll be looking at US sales figures unless otherwise noted.

Beginning at the system’s launch, Call of Duty 3 was a major title at the time. The prior game was a smash hit on Microsoft’s newly launched Xbox 360 and its sequel was there to greet the next two consoles of the current generation. The game logically sold best on Microsoft’s better established system. On the two newcomers, however, the Wii took the lead, selling nearly twice as many units of the same game on the Playstation 3. Still, it can be argued that the disparity in the install base so early in the console’s life played a major role in the game’s sales. People never make such excuses for the PS3’s other big launch window titles like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Resistance: Fall of Man, which have sold much better, but still a relatively modest 2.5 million units, combined in the US.

Speaking of which, Resistance: Fall of Man is the only Sony-produced PS3 game that has sold over a million units in the United States alone. Just a little factoid that I think should help you get an idea of what kind of game sales are more commonplace in the game industry.

Moving on, I think this sales myth is so powerful in fact, that even developers have come to believe it. Goichi Suda, aka Suda 51, has stated that the No More Heroes franchise will likely move onto a different console after No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle in order for the franchise to grow and become more successful. To be fair, he never said that it’s moving to the PS3 or 360. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he could very well have meant that the series will appear on whatever Nintendo’s next system is. Still, his interest in Xbox’ Project Natal makes that scenario unlikely.

Now, to make him want to move the franchise that has become as closely associated with the Wii as No More Heroes means the numbers must be abysmal, correct? Well, if you compare it to GTA IV, yes, they’re horrible. However, No More Heroes has managed to sell 440,000 copies worldwide. To put this in perspective, Killer 7 sold 370,000 units on the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube combined, and the PS2 alone has a larger install base than all three current gen consoles combined. To refine the perspective even more, No More Heroes on the Wii alone has sold only two-thousand or so copies less than John Woo’s Stranglehold has on the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined, which was released three months earlier.

On the violent, mature gaming side, Rockstar’s Manhunt 2 on the Wii has sold less than 100,000 fewer units than Sega’s Xbox 360 launch title, Condemned: Criminal Origins, released nearly two years earlier, and 200,000 fewer units than the sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot on the 360.

Namco’s Tales of Vesperia, an Xbox 360 exclusive, has sold roughly the same number of units as the Wii exclusive, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, despite Symphonia being released three months later.

Recently, we’ve been told that Sega-published House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld have been sales failures. Again, compared to Halo 3, sure, but look at it this way: Overkill, which has been out for only six months, has already sold half as many copies as the PS3’s Time Crisis 4, another rail-shooter, which was released in November 2007.

Madworld, described as a flop, has sold more units than Bionic Commando has in the US across both the PS3 and 360 combined. Sure, it had a two month head start, but Bionic Commando is on two consoles where there is apparently an audience for mature, hardcore games.


Even more recently, again, Sega-published The Conduit, having only sold 74,000 units its first month, is being considered a flop. Roughly speaking that’s half of what Dead Space sold on the PS3 its first month. Then you consider that Dead Space was worked on by an experienced developer, Visceral games, formerly EA Redwood, whose prior credits include The Godfather and The Simpsons Game, further compounded by the fact that publishing giant, EA, was intensely promoting the game prior to its release (a comic book series and an animated movie all released prior to the game). Then you look at what the Conduit was bringing, a small developer’s first major release and until now have released mostly licensed titles, downloadable games, and ports -- a much smaller publisher, and nowhere near capable of giving the same marketing push Dead Space received -- and the sales of The Conduit begin looking more respectable.

Notice, I’ve used only “hardcore,” third-party titles in my comparisons, the very games that we are convinced just do not sell on the Wii. Of course, the rub is that there are few games we can reasonably compare across the Wii and its HD-competition. If we chose to move beyond this smaller pool of titles, the Wii looks even more attractive.

Rock Band 2 on the Wii has sold similar numbers to the PS3 version, despite the Wii version being released only six months after the very late port of the first Rock Band onto the console. Even then, the very late, feature-stripped port of the original Rock Band has sold more copies than the PS3 version released seven months prior.

On the Guitar Hero front, the Wii is a juggernaut, having sold over 3 million copies of Guitar Hero 3 and 2 million copies of Guitar Hero: World Tour. On the Xbox 360, only Guitar Hero 3 has sold more copies than its Wii equivalent, but only a scant, 200,000 in the US. Worldwide, the Wii version still reigns supreme.

To conclude, I will say again, most games do not sell ten million units, or 5, or even one million units across a single console. It happens, yes, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. Valve’s amazing Orange Box, nor EA’s Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, SKATE, SKATE 2, Sony’s popular Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank: Future, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone 2, Microsoft-published Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Perfect Dark Zero, Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4, Street Fighter IV, and many, many, many other titles have failed to reach a million units in sales on a single system in the United States. Some haven’t even reached that number worldwide.


Games like Madworld, and The Conduit aren’t flops because they sold less than 100,000 units their first month, they’re normal, and games like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV aren’t the norm, they’re exceptions. Perhaps it’s all the marketing of these kinds of exceptional titles that make it seem like every game launched is a 2 million-over-the-first-weekend blockbuster; we keep track of those games, we expect them, and really just ignore everything else, making it seem like those big launches are the order of the day. In truth, the bulk of the industry is closer to that “everything else” we don’t follow as closely and don’t notice their half-million lifetime sales after a couple of years.

Granted, I’m sure every publisher out there would love all their games to sell five million copies, but I’m also sure that they know the grand majority of them won’t. As observers of the industry, we remember the games that have sold millions of copies. The games that don’t, well, they get played and they work their way into our shared culture, but we rarely stop to wonder how many copies that game was able to sell. Unless we see the article on GameObserver, IGN, or Kotaku telling us how many or how few copies of a game have been sold, we probably wouldn’t care, in the same way that we really don’t care how much a particular movie made at the box office.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.