Nintendo Australia last updated their brawl section around a year before'Pit' was announced as a newcomer for the game, and even that was almost a year ago.
As the long awaited sequel to Melee, 'Super Smash Brothers Brawl' swoops to glory in its Japanese and American releases, earning such titles as 'fastest selling game in NoA's history', Australian and European fans are still in wait of a release date.
However, some gamers in these areas have been rescued by the Vassal of interregional compatibility - 'Wii Freeloader', a nice piece of software developed by Datel that (as the name suggests) allows you to load up imported copies of software on your Wii.
I am both elated and annoyed at the availability of innovations such as this. On one side of the spectrum, Australian gamers that experience up to 6 month delays on games (to use the Super Paper Mario 'crisis' as an example) are now able to import and receive games roughly around the same time they release in 1st world countries - by the way, your eyes have not deceived you, I am in fact implying that game release dates are now part of the critera used to distinguish between 1st, 2nd and 3rd world nations.
On the other hand, if the 'hardcore' audience continues to import all their games, Nintendo Australia may perceive that those titles targeted at this audience are no longer profitable. This may cause them to 'forget' the hardcore title, and focus upon the release of casual numbers such as 'Wii Sports 2' & 'Mario Party 10', in effect, flooding the market with redundant party game compilations and further depriving the loyal Australian consumer of decent games for his drought-stricken Wii.
I am one of the latter, as I have solemnly sworn to await the Australian release of Brawl, in belief that my staunch support of 'hardcore' releases in Australia will eventually encourage others to take up the same cause, thereby coercing Nintendo Australia that these titles are in fact wanted here, and that something should be done to provide the gamers of Australia with the titles that we love at a reasonable time.
However, some gamers in these areas have been rescued by the Vassal of interregional compatibility - 'Wii Freeloader', a nice piece of software developed by Datel that (as the name suggests) allows you to load up imported copies of software on your Wii.
I am both elated and annoyed at the availability of innovations such as this. On one side of the spectrum, Australian gamers that experience up to 6 month delays on games (to use the Super Paper Mario 'crisis' as an example) are now able to import and receive games roughly around the same time they release in 1st world countries - by the way, your eyes have not deceived you, I am in fact implying that game release dates are now part of the critera used to distinguish between 1st, 2nd and 3rd world nations.
On the other hand, if the 'hardcore' audience continues to import all their games, Nintendo Australia may perceive that those titles targeted at this audience are no longer profitable. This may cause them to 'forget' the hardcore title, and focus upon the release of casual numbers such as 'Wii Sports 2' & 'Mario Party 10', in effect, flooding the market with redundant party game compilations and further depriving the loyal Australian consumer of decent games for his drought-stricken Wii.
I am one of the latter, as I have solemnly sworn to await the Australian release of Brawl, in belief that my staunch support of 'hardcore' releases in Australia will eventually encourage others to take up the same cause, thereby coercing Nintendo Australia that these titles are in fact wanted here, and that something should be done to provide the gamers of Australia with the titles that we love at a reasonable time.
4 comments:
Unfortunately this logic doesn't hold water for a couple of reasons.
SSBB isn't a 'hardcore' title, and hardcore gamers certainly aren't the primary target audience more than anyone else. Smash is a very popular franchise and the game will sell a ridiculous amount of local copies despite the freeloader's availability.
Let's assume it does have a serious impact on the sales, though. If the game had yet to be developed and its creation depended on the forecasted sales in Australia, I could see your point. However, the game has already been created - Nintendo of Australia simply has to print it on discs, sell it to retailers and publicize its release. Even without the crazy sales a Smash release brings, they have little reason not to sell it anyway.
If you want to convince Nintendo Australia that we want our titles provided at a reasonable time, I think decreased sales would send them exactly the message they need. In a globalized marketplace where fans are anticipating your product as early as any other country, you can't afford to make them wait extra months on end for the same thing or people will find alternate means of obtaining it - importation or piracy. Other entertainment industries (TV and movies) have picked up on this and are finally starting to act on it.
Moreover, the AUD is now less than 10 cents off the USD, but the RRP for the same game is generally twice as much here - so importing not only gets you what you want faster, but at a cheaper price! Nintendo Australia has no sympathy from me - Australian game consumers have been ripped off for far too long.
Thankyou very much for your comment.
When compared to 90% of the other titles sold on the Wii, SSBB is definitely a 'hardcore' title.
On a console such as the Wii that is unfortunately marketed towards a predominately casual audience, I would define the 'hardcore' titles as those that ALL hardcore gamers that own the system would purchase. SSBB falls into this category and it is thus a 'hardcore' title.
Additionally, the Smash Brothers series has quite a substantial competetive following as evidenced by the tournaments held at Brawl's launch, and the many websites dedicated to the competetive side of smash brothers (e.g. smashboards). This is far more than any other Wii title available could claim, hence when looked at within its context, Super Smash Brothers Brawl IS a 'hardcore' title.
Games like Smash Brothers are Nintendo's acknowledgement that yes, somebody other than Grandma and your mum own the console.
Enormous amounts of copies of smash brothers have been sold on the release days. Casual Gamers aren't usually known for lining up outside stores for hours to grab a copy of that game they have been waiting for, nor are they known for checking in on a website daily to receive updates on the game. So the initial sales figures and the existence of the 'dojo updates' seem to indicate that Smash Brothers was indeed marketed towards that 'enthusiastic & informed' portion of the Wii audience, aka the 'hardcore' portion.
Moreover, casual wii gamers are usually perceived to be daunted by games that call for the use of more than one or two buttons. As such, casual titles and hardcore titles on the Wii may also be distinguished by taking a look at their control schemes.
Example 1:
Wii sports (casual), swing the wiimote wildly while playing tennis, very little button pressing needed, nunchuk only required for one minigame
Example 2:
Wii play (casual), waggle waggle waggle, waggle waggle waggle, when do I need the buttons?
Example 3:
Mario & Sonic at the olympics (casual) WAGGLE, WAGGLE, arm tired yet?
Example 4:
Smash brothers(hardcore), pretty much every button does something, and you need to use almost every button assigned to play proficiently. Waggling is kept to a 'gimmick', i.e. you can choose to waggle the wiimote in a particular direction to do a smash attack.
CONCLUSION: Smash brothers is HARDCORE and is marketed predominately towards the HARDCORE audience on the Wii.
Hardcore gamers are known for their impatience. If you've ever played WoW, you'd know what I mean. When a server goes down, or you have to qeueu, people get on the boards and rant till the cows come home about how turdy blizzard are, when they are in fact one of the most dedicated developers in the world. As such, it is no surprise that almost all of the hardcore Wii audience in Australia would import the game rather than wait for about 6 months to get an Aussie copy.
Now, as I've previously established, Hardcore gamers ARE the core audience of Smash, and when a significant amount of those hardcore gamers decide to import Smash from overseas as opposed to waiting for the Aussie release, there will be a noticeable drop in the Smash sales in Australia.
In my post I was implying that this may keep happening. More and more hardcore titles will receive less and less sales in Australia because the hardcores will keep importing. Nintendo may then see these poor regional sales figures and be encouraged to focus upon what is actually making them money in Australia.
Nintendo is first and foremost a business, so in my opinion they'd probably work harder to speed up the release of casual titles in Australia to make some quick cash, rather than spending a whole lot of money on marketing the games that don't seem to have much of an audience in Australia.
"In a globalized marketplace where fans are anticipating your product as early as any other country, you can't afford to make them wait extra months on end for the same thing or people will find alternate means of obtaining it -"
Correct, and guess what? Nintendo HAS made us wait extra months and we have found an alternate means of obtaining it. So it appears that they could in fact 'afford to do so'.
I'm saying that we shouldn't flock to the importer, because when Nintendo analyses their sales figures they are going to say:
"hmmm well smash brothers doesn't seem to have much of an audience, so perhaps we can conclude that the hardcore audience in Australia is either very small or do not own Wiis"
Nintendo is then faced with two options:
A) Spend extra money on marketing something that sales figures have proved to be less profitable than say Wii fit
OR
B) Spend extra money on marketing Wii Fit 2 and be pretty much guaranteed a big return.
As a business, I'm pretty sure they'd pick B
Lastly, games are not cheaper from overseas.
Don't forget to factor in shipping costs.
Additionally, if it is your first time importing, add the cost of the freeloader to the overall price.
When you are finished adding I'm sure the overall import price > the Australian price.
Anyway, thankyou for the comment, much appreciated and thanks for sharing your opinion:D
Happy to comment - your piece was well written, and I'll keep watching this blog in the future. :)
I agree that SSBB is - relative to other Wii titles - a more hardcore game, both in terms of how many hardcore players play it and the style of gameplay. Despite this, these hardcore players will still make up a very small portion of the sales of the Smash game due to its immense popularity with players of all kinds.
Sure, retirement homes may not be jumping on it like Wii Sports and such, but the fact that most people who are going to playing it are competent teenagers/young adults doesn't change the fact that most of them aren't hardcore gamers who would be motivated to import the game. Smash will still sell heaps of local copies - that's just a fact.
I actually found your article through Smashboards myself, being an active participant in the local competitive scene for Smash - so I'm well aware of the hardcore enthusiasm for the game. This, however, just provides more proof that the impact it could possibly have on sales is negligible. The Couch Warriors tournaments in Melbourne are likely the most popular competitive Smash event of any state, but they currently pull less than 50 people. Perhaps most tellingly, even out of these most "hardcore" players in the state, maybe 10 (if that) have actually bothered to import the game.
You suggest Nintendo might come to this conclusion:
"hmmm well smash brothers doesn't seem to have much of an audience, so perhaps we can conclude that the hardcore audience in Australia is either very small or do not own Wiis"
For how Nintendo would react to a loss of sales due to imports, we can only speculate - but in the event of crappy sales of a Smash game, Nintendo would have to have very ignorant analysts to ignore the possibility that they lost sales due to mass importation of the game they forced people to wait extra months if this really was the case. With a proper analysis, the obvious solution would be to release your game in step with the rest of the world, thus removing incentive for people to import the game in the first place!
I don't particularly care if they do spend more money marketing Wii Fit 2 since Nintendo Australia has no hand in the actual development process of hardcore games. If they decided to stop selling the games locally, then I'd just start importing them. But they won't stop selling games locally - the game will still have been developed in Japan or wherever, and they still stand to profit from selling it here, even if that profit shrinks.
As for price, I know many people who import, and I can say games certainly are cheaper from overseas. You can factor in shipping and convert currency, and it will usually still be cheaper. The freeloader may be an added expense, but the money saved will easily make up for it in the long run. You can alternatively import the console itself, which will also be cheaper.
An example: a friend imported a Japanese Wii & Brawl from popular import site play-asia.com. The Wii was US$ 299.00 (~328.07 AUD), Brawl US$ 69.90 (~76.70 AUD). Compare this to the Australian RRP of the Wii of $400 and the usual Aus RRP of a game, $100. I'm not sure how much he paid for shipping, but I feel pretty safe saying it doesn't make up the price difference!
Nintendo is indeed first and foremost a business, and in my relationship with them, I am first and foremost a consumer - and I don't see why I should pay more to get the same game later.
I have previously postulated that those who pre-order and line-up to obtain a copy of smash on its day of release can be considered hardcore gamers. This is due to the fact that the casual audience (especially the casual Wii audience) are usually not privvy to such things as release dates and are unwilling to queue outside a store to get a game.
Now given that the people that purchased the game on the first day are 'hardcore gamers', sales figures in Japan and the US have shown this audience to be extremely large.
"In Japan, Brawl sold over 500,000 units on launch day,[88] 820,000 units in its first week,[66] and about 1.49 million units total as of March 23, 2008.[16] In North America, Brawl sold over 874,000 units on launch day and over 1.4 million units in its first week, making it the fastest selling title in Nintendo of America's history.[17]"
So there is approximately 500,000 hardcore smash fans in Japan and 874,000 in the states. These are not small figures, and they account for probably a third or Japan's total brawl sales to date.
Now imagine Japan being in Australia's position. Faced with an undefined waiting period for Smash, I'd estimate that there would be a large number of that hardcore audience choosing to import.
Now Australia, having a smaller gaming audience than both Japan and the US would be more severely affected. The casual sales MAY fail to offset the lost hardcore sales of the game.
Now as you said, Nintendo's reaction to this hypothetical situation is highly speculative. But given the risk inherent with attempting to remarket products that sales figures have shown to be not so popular, I think it is feasible to estimate that Nintendo may shift focus onto the financially safer casual titles.
Of course, I agree that if Nintendo were able to ascertain that the reason for the sales drop was importation, then they'd rectify the problem by releasing it here earlier. However, how would Nintendo confirm this, as far as I know a lot of people have been importing through sites such as ebay. I don't see how Nintendo could keep accurate tabs on something like this. Furthermore, isn't importation illegal lol? That in itself should be reason enough not to do it, but I understand the injustice gamers feel at being robbed of that extra $20 and the agony of those extra 6 months spent in waiting for the game that everybody else has been playing (hence my blog).
It has been speculated that Nintendo Australia is purely unable to get earlier releases due to their lack of power relative to NoA and NoJ. So, if nothing else, supporting regional sales of brawl may help bolster Nintendo Australia's financial strength enough for them to have more of a say in localisation issues.
Thanks again for the comment.
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