Michael Pachter On Wii’s ‘Shovelware’

Wedbush Morgans top videogame analyst, Mr Michael Pachter, has been talking Nintendo again and more specifically the “lot of crap” and “shovelware” that resides on the Wii.

We have to agree with Mr Pachter. The Wii with its new motion controls and the success of Wii Sports spurned a huge amount of cheaply developed games by all kinds of developers wanting to jump on the bandwagon. Of course there are some great titles on Wii too and all popular consoles are flooded with cheaply produced games that receive poor ratings by critics, however the Wii may set a new record for the console with the highest amount of shovelware ever!

In an interview with Gamasutra the Pachter says:

“The housewives who thought Wii Fit looked like fun, the grandmas who thought that Wii Sports would be a fun thing to play with their grandkids, and the 20-somethings who only wanted to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band… none of them people who you’d call ‘gamers’. They are not buying much more software. They bought what they wanted and don’t feel the need to buy more – nor are they aware of what other Wii games are out there. They’re oblivious.”

More on Pachters thoughts after the break.

“Wii publishers need to concentrate on fewer games but games of higher quality. There is just too much shovelware around — like the $15 games in the end-cap bargain bins at Target. Companies like Majesco just spin them out non-stop and there are tons of them. They aren’t helping anybody keep their lights on.

How many of those [Wii games] do you think cost more than $5 million to develop? Probably five,” stated Pachter. “And how many cost over $3 million? Probably 100. The problem is that they’re so easy to make. I think there are three Wii cheerleader games on the market. There’s a lot of that crap around.

The real question is what is Nintendo going to do about the fact that their third-party software isn’t moving since theirs is a royalty model and less content isn’t good for them,” he concluded. “They need to do something to encourage the third parties to create more, not less, content.

Otherwise, Nintendo is going to lose all its third-party royalties and, well, they can’t afford that.”