Madworld needs Gordon Ramsay

It was raining the other day. I was meant to go trainspotting with my friend Dwayne, Dwayne Dibley. But he forgot his thermos, and Dwayne never goes anywhere without that. What to do? I got all my old VHS tapes out and re-classified them according to the date I recorded their content. Once that was done I was at a loose end, so I went to vgchartz and had a look round.

They have a lot of sales data there. It may or may not be accurate, but lets assume it gives a half decent idea of what sells.

The Wii has just over sixty titles that have crossed the million mark. From Wii Fit at twenty-odd million down to a Hannah Montana game that has just kissed the mill. The core Nintendo games are there, Galaxy, Zelda, Mario Kart and Brawl. Metroid Prime 3 is the least successful of these at around 1.3 million. Is this why the series is moving on with Other M?

These core Nintendo gamers know what they like then. One thing they don’t like is games like Madworld, The Conduit and Dead Space Extraction. Admittedly, its early days for Dead Space but the signs aren’t great. All these games are new, not part of a series, and perhaps that explains their lack of success. These have only just scraped the 300,000 mark so far.

Sequels don’t do that well. House of the Dead 2&3 is into the millions but House of the Dead: Overkill is way behind that, in spite of being made for the Wii and well-received. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 nearly made the million, but the superior sequel PES 2009 is way behind. Tiger Woods ‘o8 is the best-selling Tiger game. The updates from 2009 and this year’s outstanding MotionPlus version are nowhere close to that, despite being better. Read more »