The debate

Who is invited to party with Mario? Since Japanese developer Suda51 (’Killer7′) expressed disappointment about his latest title ‘No More Heroes’, a Wii exclusive, selling below expectations, it appears that the Mario party is a fairly exclusive event. “Only Nintendo titles are doing well,” he said. Although he later mitigated his criticism, the question remains: how profitable is the Wii platform for third party publishers and particularly for exclusive substance?

Nintendo has now answered to that criticism. And they agree: While the platform itself is continuing to outsell the competition, the bulk of the software sold is Nintendo’s own.

‘We believe the situation will change,’ says Japanese giant
Nintendo (…), saying that it believes the situation is only temporary.

According to the company’s third-quarter report meeting transcription, translated by Develop, the problem is simply one of the Wii still being a young system - and that, as such, Nintendo’s internal teams currently have an significant advantage.

“When we develop new

hardware at Nintendo, we do so as a collaboration within the hardware development teams and the software development teams. Our software sales percentage is currently high considering our internal teams teams know the Wii’s special characteristics best, and they started development quite a bit before the Wii’s release. However, we believe that eventually that will change,” said the firm.

“If you look at the goods for our third quarter you’ll see that, out of the 14 Wii titles that shipped by a million units, 11 of those were our titles. However, whether you look at the 50 titles that shipped by a million units on DS, only 28 of those are ours.

“We identified the same thing in the DS’ first period, and the situation continues to change little by little. For the Wii too, we believe that as instance passes, the proportion of high-selling titles that come from our licensees will increase.”

Riding the slipstream

Nintendo editors are talking about a