People are putting themselves on a slippery slope with this issue if you ask me. They demand 100% accuracy in the data they receive but they also use NPD, which itself isn't 100% accuracte. People just need to accept that there's no way you are ever going to get 100% accurate data.RurouniSaiyajin

Exactly. What discrepancies occured this time which are so major that VGchartz is now useless? Persoanlly I think it is ok to use to get an idea of how things are selling in between NPD reports or to get an idea of worldwide sales. Its only useless for idiots that think that one console outselling the other by a couple of 1,000 units is significant.

There's more demand for Wii than any other console in history... Nintendo will raise production dramatically this yer.gomanthethird

No they won't. Nintendo are not going to increase production, they are very conservative when it comes to production, hell they didn't even have enough capacity to produce games in the run up to christmas.

Neither. GRAW2's health system: you get shot, you stay shot.OhhSnap50893

Realistic damage is my favorite. Limping etc after leg shots. 2 or 3 body shots without body armor = kill. headshot = kill.

Oh and no respawn, just team against team, you die you stay dead till the next round.

It seems like they give out perfect 40/40 9/9/9/9 scores like it's candy. No game is ever perfect, why do people bother using them as a source?catlin_czirr

Regardless of the fact that they have only given 7 40/40's since the playstation 1 (roughly one every two years), why are people so obsessed with not giving games the top score available? No-one ever said that a top score = perfect (ok gamespot used to but they recently changed that). One argument goes that you can't give any game a 100% score because if a better game comes out then you have no place to go. But if you dissallow the top score (10 on gamespot) then the next lowest score becomes your best possible score (9.5 on Gamespot). But you can't give a 9.5 because if a better game comes out then you would have to give it a 10, which is what we dissallowed in the first place. So the best you can give a game is a 9, but you can't give it a 9 because if there is a better game you would have to give it a 9.5, and we already know you can't do that, etc etc etc until you can't score games at all.

I am not sure about the sales of Lost Planet, Assassin's Creed, and COD4, but using Halo3 isn't a great example. Just like many Mario games, that game is almost garaunteed to sell well, i selled extremely well because of the advertising but we all knew it would sell well, afterall that was the game that got many to buy a 360 early on way before it even had a set release date.

Kekira

But they still blitzed the TV with commercials, still had tie-ins with fast food companies etc etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the advertising budget was the same as the cost of the game itself. And you better believe that they spent their money wisely. we'll never know how much it would have sold without the hype machine but it would have been significantly less.

I agree on the advertising part, but considering that the Wii audience seems to be made mostly of people who aren't into gaming as many here on gamespot are and are pretty ignorant or ill-informed on gaming news, it'd take more advertising for the Wii than it would for the PS3 and 360, especially for a new IP or games that require time to play, time that many people don't have nowadays. That's likely the main reason why many buy the Wii, it has a greater amount of pick up and play games that do not require too much patience to play. That's not to say it doesn't have any challenging games, I'm sure it does, but these games are vastly overshadowed by these other titles.

Kekira

Capcom blitzed the TV with comercials for Lost Planet. Assassins Creed, COD4, Halo3, all had massive TV presence. Were they wasting their money? PS3 and 360 owners in general are just as uninformed as Wii owners. Massive hype on TV is the only way to reach the mass audience on any system, which is a sad but true fact.

I think the problem is that everyone seems to have made up their minds about what Wii owners want and don't want. Apparently all we want are minigames because we bought one or two minigame collections. Guess what, most people only need 1 or 2 minigame collections. We bought Resident Evil 4 and RE:UC in large numbers, but apparently it was just name recognition, we thought these games would be minigame collections as well. We didn't buy Manhunt 2, not because it wasn't very good, but because it wasn't a casual game. 360 owners buy Guitar Hero games because they are fun, hardcore games that have punishing difficulty levels. Wii owners apparently buy GH3 in large numbers because we kinda recognize the name.

I agree with the article but it mainly seems to be telling us that the only 3rd party games that are selling well are the big budget, good brand recognition, well advertised games (and one reasonably well advertised, low budget mini game collection). This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Capcom spent $20 million dollars advertising Lost Planet, I would be surprised if they spent $20 advertising Zack and Wiki.

Since XBL gold membership makes use of:

• Infrastructure that allows the community to self-govern with:
  • Gamer zone
  • Rep
  • Prefer/avoid status
  • Feedback, with a team spread across several countries to monitor feedback and play in random games to police the system
• 2 levels of matchmaking:
  • Preference-based with the features listed above
  • Skill-based using the proprietary TrueSkill system
• Functional cross-game invite system that brings you straight into a friend's session
• Closed, secure network that actively checks for modded consoles

Not only that, but compared to the competition, MS seems to be the best connected to its community

• There's MS personnel dedicated to the Xbox Live community like Major Nelson and Trixie
• They have MVP, Ambassador and Community Developer Programs. See the gamercards in our sigs? MS didn't make those.
• But they do have their programmers help community sites.
• Community Calendar with Ladies Night, Prime Time and Family Game Night, Play with Devs, Game With Fame

MS had a cross-country campaign to help educate parents and legislators about online gaming.

That's plenty to justify the cost.

VoodooHak

But how much do you think it costs MS per year to provide this? Assuming maybe 5 million Gold subscribers at $50 = $250million dollars a year = over one billion dollars over the average console lifetime. How much of this billion dollars will be spent on maintaining the XBL system?