Super Paper Mario came out this month and it is the first Wii game since launch that I would tell somebody to go and buy, which is a slightly damning thing to be able to say in April about a console released in November.
The drought is real and it is the thing I was worried about in January. The machine is still difficult to find in shops, and the software released for it in five months amounts to a Zelda that was also a GameCube game, a party collection sold with a controller, a very good WarioWare, and now this. That is not a famine by launch-window standards. It is thin for a console selling this well.
What is filling the gap is worse than nothing, and everybody in this industry can see it coming. Publishers have worked out that a Wii game costs a fraction of a PlayStation 3 game to make, that the audience buying this console is not reading reviews, and that a box with a waggle mechanic and a licensed character on the front will sell some number of copies regardless of whether it is any good. The shovelware wave has started. It will get considerably worse before Christmas.
That is the exact failure mode I described in January as the wrong lesson: the industry concluding that motion control sells consoles, and spending three years bolting waggle onto games that did not need it. I did not expect to be watching it happen by April.
Nintendo’s position on this has historically been that quality sorts itself out, and there is a version of that argument which holds. The people buying a Wii because somebody played tennis at a party are not going to be put off by a bad licensed platformer, because they were never going to buy it. The risk is subtler: a household with one good game and three disappointing ones stops browsing the shelf, and the console becomes the thing under the television that gets used at parties.
Super Paper Mario is a useful counterexample and also a slightly odd one. It is a Mario game that is mostly a role-playing game, with a dimension-flipping mechanic that is genuinely clever, and it barely uses the controller everybody bought the machine for. Nintendo’s best Wii software so far is the software that ignores the Wii’s defining feature.
Virtual Console continues to do quiet work in the background and I suspect it is holding more households than anybody credits. Selling somebody a game they loved at fourteen for a few pounds is close to free money and it keeps the machine switched on between releases.
What Nintendo needs before Christmas is two or three things that could not exist anywhere else and are unambiguously good. It has the studios. Whether it has the release schedule is the open question, and five months of evidence does not settle it either way.