Wii Retail Games

The Nintendo Channel advertised 117 games at the time data was taken, though only 96 of them represented games that could currently be purchased by consumers—the rest were all previews.  Of these, 60 of the games had usage tracking data.



Biggest Blockbusters: Wii Sports (24,937,093 sessions, 28.28 sessions/person) is the obvious winner here. Since it came with the system, it tracked nearly one to one with the estimated number of polled users at nearly 882,000 players. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (12,241,565 sessions, 22.37 sessions/person) takes the #2 spot, though the drop-off is significant at an estimated 547,000 players. Though Nintendo first-party titles do take up the majority of the top ten—Guitar Hero III (7,332,886 sessions, 30.76 sessions/person)is the only third-party title there, with nearly 240,000 players—Nintendo first party games also make up the majority of the tracked games, so it’s important not to place too much stock in that factoid alone.



Biggest Time Sinks: Here we see how dedicated Wii users truly are to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Despite losing out the packed-in Wii Sports by over 300,000 players, it tops the total count of hours played 30,711,855 to 29,476,976. On average, people put 56 hours 7 minutes into Super Smash Bros, versus 33 hours 26 minutes for Wii Sports—this possibility indicates that gamers are rewarding Smash Bros. wealth of content with their time, though most likely it means that there a lot of matches going on in dorm rooms. After a precipitous drop-off, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess takes the number three spot with 20,563,670 hours invested at an average of 46 hours 58 minutes contributed per person—an indication that many people actually did see the ending of this long game.

An interesting outlier in this data is Pokemon Battle Revolution—at an average per person count of 18 hours 55 minutes, a lot of people are finding a lot to do with a product most reviewers agreed was pretty thin on content. If this is an indicator of how much time the average Pokemon fan put into a game that was just about Pokemon battling, imagine how much time these people put into Diamond and Pearl.



Low Points: It’s here that the limitations of the opt-in tracking system and the lack of truly low-end data becomes apparent. The game with the lowest estimated player base was Rock Band (25,720 sessions, 4.3 sessions/person), but this can be largely disregarded as it’s a new product that probably only had a few days of usage tracked--though with over twelve hours of play time logged per player, those were some pretty busy days. The next lowest was Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey (43,348 sessions, 5.77 sessions/player), which speaks more to the nature of the poll sample than any weakness in the Disney Princess brand. And next on the list is Iron Man (32,167 sessions, 3.08 sessions/player), but its place on the list speaks contrary to the game’s known retail success. All these numbers are almost certainly skewed by limitations in the data; it’s highly unlikely that the products that truly represented the console’s low point will ever be revealed.

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