I take a look at the recent decrease in Virtual Console and WiiWare output on Wii, and speculate.
The Virtual Console (I’ll refer to it as VC) has been out since the Wii debuted, sporting many titles a week (usually 5 or more, counting WiiWare). However, since early August through now, we haven’t gotten that many games, and the weeks to come don’t show much promise either. For those of you who are unaware, the Virtual Console is a way for Nintendo to release older games on the Wii as downloadable games, and they also throw in some new titles as well (WiiWare). Due to the lack of released games weekly, I can safely speculate that there are two reasons why Nintendo has not paid much attention to the VC: audience, and competition.
Why do I say this? Well, for one thing, it seems as if since E3 the audience that they are catering to does not care for the Virtual Console at the moment (that is, unless you would prefer to buy things off of the VC). At this point in time, it’s best for Nintendo to get going, while also catering to their older audience, which is exactly what they’re doing. With titles such as Metroid: Other M, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and much more, they’ve kept the audience behind them with one thing: nostalgia. Yes, I said that. Don’t deny it, but Nintendo can only pull at your nostalgic heartstrings for so long before people start to notice, and that is obviously what they are doing here. Although, you could present the argument that the VC is another way of doing that, but that’s what it was made for: not so much Wii games.
A picture of an example Wii home, with some Virtual Console applications added.
However, that does not seem to be the only questionable thing happening with the VC at the moment. What also comes to play in this situation is the fact that the holidays are coming out soon, and there will be some competition (with Kinect, Move, Black Ops) which could be motivating them to come out with more releases more frequently once those months kick in. For now, the VC is a steady service, but could be questionably going downhill, but there is promise that something huge will hit.
Looking to the future, I could easily see the Big N surprising us with brilliant releases off of the Virtual Console and WiiWare (such as Fluidity), so they haven’t given up completely. However, when you have a company that is so successful for what they’ve been doing, it seems that cutting off from one of the redeeming qualities about the Wii wouldn’t be the right thing to do, which is why I still have faith that they’ll pull through and surprise us.
What do you guys think about the lack of VC/WiiWare games? Feel free to speculate in the comments section.
As far as the VC is concerned, I think they've pretty much just run out of quality software. It's a shame they never got the rights to certain games though, like Chrono Trigger.
What I think Nintendo needs to do is to start porting some ds/game boy games games to the wii like POKEMON that alone would sell a shit load of wiis or make a Pokemon game for the wii and not like the shitty battle revolutions No i mean a Real Pokemon rpg..also they just need to make more games and make some new franchises and make them enjoyable for both adults and kids,more mature games like monster hunter tri and they need to advertise more they got some great games but a lot of people that don't have a wii might not know that.