Nintendo's President Speaks

Satoru Iwata Addresses Concerns Over Attach Rate

Nintendo claims Wii attach rate is good, better than DS, contrary to what some publishers and journalists are saying.

I saw this article, Iwata: Concerns Over Third Party Sales Don't Reflect The Fact, on Nintendo World Report yesterday. It was a really long analysis of some fiscal briefing Satoru Iwata gave about Wii's third party sales. Frankly, I didn't care enough to read it because it had all these great slides and graphs to illustrate it! 

Here's one of them:

This graph shows that while Nintendo sells many games on the Wii, they're not selling as much, at least in the latter half of '07, as third party games. Yeah, so? I still see one company comprising two fifths of the consoles software sales! Which means that even if the attach rate is somewhat higher than people are led to believe, it's still mostly Nintendo games. Nintendo is one company here, and all third party publishers are lumped together for this graph. 

This isn't all Nintendo's fault, except for the fact they make awesome games and you'd be an idiot not to buy them (if you like games and have a Wii). Third parties DO need to realize that Wii owners will buy their games, they just need to put more development resources into their Wii offerings. Third party Wii games suck (for the most part), and if third parties put half as much effort into their games as Nintendo does, maybe they could comprise a significant chunk of Wii software sales too.

Wouldn't you buy a good game, whether or not Nintendo made it?