THQ: Wii is a third party nightmare

Ready for some harsh, but true words? Danny Bilson, Senior Vice President of Creative Development explains the reality for third parties looking to get their games out onto consoles. Ouch.

“…the nightmare of all for third parties, frankly, is the Wii.  The Wii is a Monopoly box in a closet!  I’ve got my Wii Sports and I’m good!  I take it out, get the family around, we flail around for a couple hours, and we’re happy until next month when we take it out, or maybe for junior’s birthday, I’m going to buy him a Mario game.

Here’s the deal: there is so much junk on the Wii that if you add up all the numbers of those hundreds of SKUs, I’m sure you can cough up some number that’s impressive.  If you go to GameStop, and you look at the Wii wall… you can’t find anything.  It’s a big conglomeration of junk and the Nintendo stuff pops, and a couple of other things pop, and that’s it.  On PS3 and 360, same day, there was a nice neat little 25 SKUs that they were showing for each one on the rack, and it was easy to see what’s there and to see a general level of quality.  The Wii is just flooded with junk and all kinds of stuff.

Right now, we’re not moving hardcore stuff to the Wii.  We were; we stopped it, just because we’re a little risk averse.  I want to be with the culture of the Monopoly box in the closet – I’ve got to feed them.  I’ve got to get them to want to buy another game, because they’re not the gamers that are looking forward to the next thing next week in putting in the pre-orders and all that.”

THQ is still supporting the Wii, but they’re doing it through the casual, family-type games. But don’t worry, if all the third parties give us the casual stuff, we’ll still get our hardcore fix from Nintendo… right… ?

Industry Gamers
via Vooks