Mature titles make no splash on Nintendo consoles

Both games are unusual for Nintendo releases in that they espouse blood and guts, inappropriate language, and “mature” themes, the kind of stuff much more prevalent on Sony and Microsoft’s platforms. And, as the weak sales figures show, there might be a good reason why.

MadWorld has only moved 66,000 copies since its early March launch, and GTA:Chinatown Wars, a slightly newer title, moved 89,000. Still, keep in mind the practical license to print money that is the GTA brand name, and you wouldn’t be wrong to presume the latter title should have done better.

So is it true then? Are mature titles doomed to mediocre sales at the house that Mario built, even when they have quality gameplay backing them up? Both products, after all, have been critical darlings, earning scores hovering between eighty per cent and perfect by the enthusiast press.

It’s not an argument entirely without merit, and it’s one that would lead to believe the reverse is true regarding family-friendly Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 games. For example, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, the third in a cartoony series of platforming games starring a comical bear and bird duo on Microsoft’s console, is reportedly having a hard time pushing past the 140,000 mark.

And yet, on the PS3, the hit “create-your-own-world-to-play-in” game LittleBigPlanet, whose main character is an adorable little creature stitched together from an old cloth sack with a pair of literal button eyes, has shipped 611,000 units in North America alone.

So what’s going on here? I think the key difference is “hype.” With the Wii and DS, Nintendo has built itself a huge advertising machine, true, and those two brands are probably much better known by the non-gaming populace than the other two consoles.

But that advertising machine still hinges on the old, family-friendly vibe Nintendo has had ever since the NES days. Mature titles have always been slightly worse sellers on the big N’s consoles. Though I believe they have their legitimate place there, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I also think Nintendo is almost deliberate in not plunking advertising dollars to hype them to the extent it did Wii Play or Super Mario Galaxy.

In contrast, Sony and Microsoft know that the wider gaming audience is less familiar with their consoles, and I believe they take an extra step when it comes to advertising the kinds of the titles the latter would embrace. That’s why Sony has been talking about LittleBigPlanet incessantly for the last two to three years. When I received a recent

e-mail from a Sony PR rep, his very signature included a JPEG picture of Sackboy, the aforementioned protagonist of LittleBigPlanet.

To be fair, of course, LittleBigPlanet is published by Sony, so it would receive more ad dollars than completely third-party titles like MadWorld would by Nintendo. That is a related problem, though. Nintendo historically has done little to help out third-party software on its consoles, which is why its own self-published software has done better.

But even then, when it comes to mature first-party titles, the big N tends to not hype them up so well. In 2002, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, one of those rare games that actually took the term “mature” beyond blood and T & A, with actual allusions to Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe in its dense story, was developed and released by Silicon Knights. The Canadian studio was, back then, completely owned by Nintendo. Despite receiving accolades from practically anyone who grabbed a controller, its sales were nothing to write home about.

Yet this early bit of news should hardly be taken as a sign that developers and publishers can’t turn a profit with a well-crafted mature title on the Wii. Last year’s No More Heroes, another gory game in the vein of MadWorld, began with rather slow sales, but managed to go past 150,000 afterward. Nothing stellar, of course, but it was enough to get its designers to work on a sequel.