Several weeks ago, we ran a story about an interview with Jeff Bell, head of Microsoft Game’s division in which he criticized Nintendo for the success of their first-party titles for the Wii. Cinemablend.com’s Jonathan Stulce has written a stirring Op/Ed piece entitled ‘You Failed The Wii‘ about the consumer’s responsibility to go out and support the good third-party titles before they are removed from the shelves.
Have you played Zack and Wiki on the Wii? If the sales numbers are a hint, the chances are you haven’t. This is too bad, since not playing this game is going to wind up hurting the Wii library. In an industry as fast paced as video games, a title has approximately two weeks to prove itself. If the sales aren’t up to par, the space is quickly replaced with a game that will keep the retailer profitable. Already, Zack and Wiki has been removed from many retailer shelves.
He proceeds to bring up the point that if we as the gamers do not support the third-party gems, developers will have no choice to continue to create shoddy, cheap shovelware.
Third parties are going to stop creating full fledged adventures if we don’t go out and buy them. Capcom are more than deserving of our money with Zack and Wiki. A common complaint of any Nintendo console library since the N64 has been the lack of third party support. With such an onslaught of crappy, shoddily put together video games, customers searching for a Wii title are forced to dig through the selections presented to them and hopefully find a title that provides 50 dollars worth of joy. Capcom takes the time to develop a game that’s a solid platform puzzler, infuse it with a cell shaded look, throw in some humor and challenges, and it goes ignored by customers. My New Year’s resolution is to buy more full length third party games, and support the industry I have grown to love. Vote with your money, and let the industry know you are interested in new, original games… and pick up Zack and Wiki: Quest for BarBaros’ Treasure.
