PushingPlay

Wii Music wasn’t setting out to please the hardcore. This was painfully obvious from the E3 reactions. The enthusiast press knew that whatever it was, it was going to sell like hotcakes, just like every self-branded Wii game that came out of Nintendo. Wii Music has been out for almost two months now, and some are starting to call it the “Wii’s First Flop”. Let’s find out what everyone thinks of Wii music, two months later.

The Critics: The Nintendo-produced Wii Whatevershiggyhasbeendoingwithhisfreetime series hasn’t done that well critically to date. Wii Music’s Metascore falls just beneath the average for the Wii titles.

• Wii Fit - 80
• Wii Sports - 76
• Wii Music - 63
• Wii Chess (Europe Only) - 59
• Wii Play - 58
• AVERAGE: - 67

The bulk of the critical complaints were the shallow gameplay and the limited track list. Some outlets, like 1Up, thought that Wii Music accomplished exactly what it set out to do, and it did it well. On the other side of the spectrum, outlets like GameRevolution were less than impressed. Be it positive or negative, more than a few people had an extreme opinion of Wii Music. There are 9 reviews that are 80% or above on Metacritic, and on the opposite side, there are 14 reviews that are 50% or below.

The Internet: This article was what began this Wii Music examination. It claimed that Wii Music was flopping because the sales were low and the Yahoo! searches were lower compared to “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band”. To put some hard facts to this, I jumped over to Google Trends. Dropping in the keywords “Guitar Hero”, “Rock Band” and “Wii Music”, and examining the searches in the past 30 days, I got this graph:

Wii Music is clearly less popular than Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In fact, Rock Band is more than 6 times more popular, and Guitar Hero is more than 14 times more popular than Wii Music. However, there are some things to consider. First is Wii Music is not a franchise. “Guitar Hero” can refer to 7 console games, plus many more portable and mobile games. Additionally, “Guitar Hero” is pretty much a household name, so I revised the terms to be “Guitar Hero: World Tour”, “Rock Band 2″ and “Wii Music”.

On this graph, Guitar Hero and Rock band are far closer to Wii Music, but they still hold a lot of room. These statistics must be taken with a grain of salt because Guitar Hero and Rock Band are both on Xbox 360, Playstation 2 and 3, and the Wii, whereas Wii Music only has one platform to work with. However, it still makes sense that the internet would generally be more interested in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, because of Nintendo’s demographic. We can’t really assume that the seniors and soccer moms are regularly searching for Wii Music on Google, but we can assume that John Teenager is searching Google to figure out what band sim he’s going to buy.

The Rest of the Planet: In the end, no one cares what critics said, no one cares what the internet said, everyone cares about how it sold. Well, according to Gamasutra, it’s selling pretty well. It ranked #1 for Wii on Amazon, but that doesn’t mean anything unless we put that into some sort of perspective. (Note: When I visited Amazon to check their stock, Wii Music was at #4, much closer to the NPD average than before). According to Gamasutra’s NPD numbers, Wii Music sold 297,000, landing it at the bottom of the NPD list.

1. Gears of War 2 (Microsoft, Xbox 360) - 1.56 million
2. Call of Duty: World At War (Activision Blizzard, Xbox 360) - 1.41 million
3. Wii Play (Nintendo, Wii) - 796,000
4. Wii Fit (Nintendo, Wii) - 697,000
5. Mario Kart (Nintendo, Wii) - 637,00
6. Call of Duty: World At War (Activision Blizzard, PS3) - 597,000
7. Guitar Hero: World Tour (Activision Blizzard, Wii) - 475,000
8. Left 4 Dead (Electronic Arts, Xbox 360) - 410,000
9. Resistance 2 (Sony, PlayStation 3) - 385,000
10. Wii Music (Nintendo, Wii) - 297,000

Wii Music can’t be considered a flop by the entire industry, since 297,000 units is pretty respectable. However, if Mario Kart was released in April and is still breaking 600,000 units, Wii Music should be at least coming close to that, especially considering their massive marketing campaign.

The Verdict: I think that Wii Music’s game content was a misstep, but the entire package was not a flop. The strong advertising campaign and the fact that Wii Music had the advantage of the Wii’s massive install base saved the game from horrible sales numbers. It’s no Wii Fit, but it’s definitely not a Virtual Boy by any means.