Analyst: Wii fails Boom Blox’s “true test”
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 5:48pm by Derek
With his celestial voice, Freddy Mercury once belted the words, “Another one bites the dust.”
Nearly three decades later, the meaning of the prophetic lyric is clear. The latest NPD sales figures show Boom Blox, EA’s critically acclaimed collaboration with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, sold a paltry 60,000 copies in May.
As with Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes and Okami, it is disappointing to see quality third-party Wii efforts tank in the market. According to analyst firm Pacific Crest Securities’ Evan Wilson, Boom Blox’s failure is also indicative of a long-term trend for third-parties on Wii.
“Boom Blox was a true test of the potential for third-party success on Nintendo Wii. It appears that success on the Wii will remain difficult to achieve,” said Wilson during his NPD analysis for this month.
Difficult to achieve, at least, for publishers who release good games. The stylish graph below shows May’s top five best-selling third-party Wii games and their aggregate Metacritic review scores.
When Game Party outsells Boom Blox, something is wrong.
To be fair, gamers might be well-advised to take assessments from Pacific Crest with a hearty grain of salt. This is the same firm that had projected, according to MTV Multiplayer, Boom Blox would sell around 250,000 units in May, suggesting Wilson and Pacific Crest may be slightly disconnected from third-party realities on Wii.
Their point, however, is accurate. As Blake and David have pointed out consistently since its release, Boom Blox is one of the most enjoyable, quality third-party efforts available on Wii. But like many great third-party Wii titles before it, it seems destined for the dusty depths of Wal-Mart budget bins, its shiny white casing dented and dirtied and its riotous, family-friendly experiences unrecognized by the audience it was primarily created for.
EA is less pessimistic in regard to Boom Blox, however, and CEO John Riccitello painted a much brighter picture yesterday for investors attending the William Blair Investor Conference:
“(Boom Blox) has met our expectations internally. … It has continued to sell well. It did break into the top ten for the Wii, and the advertising is doing exactly what (our) team expected to: drive sales.”
It is worth noting that Capcom made similar statements about the lackluster sales performance of Zack & Wiki and that Riccitello was speaking to investors who, you know…want to hear good news.
Perhaps Boom Blox has proven it. Aside from “geeks and otaku,” no one cares about the collective opinion of the gaming media. And why should they? What would they know, those who make their living by playing and critiquing just about everything a system has to offer?
Excuse me while I go vomit disappointment.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
…also indicative of long term consumer lameness… that said, I am going to go pick up Zack & Wiki right away.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I don’t care much for the “…true test of the potential for third-party success…” I am a casual gamer that plays games. If one doesn’t appeal to me, I just won’t buy it. Boom Blox doesn’t really appeal to me. OK, build something and then destroy it?!? Is this what it really is? I remember destruction games back in the N64 days. Why doesn’t someone come up with Blast Corps (from Rare) clone? I enjoyed that and would love for that on the Wii. I still have it on my N64 although as Blast Dozer (Japanese). I couldn’t read it but it was the action. Lost Winds has set the platform for new games. Many people love 2D platform games (see New Super Mario Bros.).
June 18th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
That this game hasn’t sold well is disappointing. That I had to wait well over a month for it to come from GameFly means people were afraid of the pricetag. Hmm, maybe I was part of the problem, but no longer. I’m'a buy the game and get the word out that it’s awesome. Three people I’ve shown it to are going to buy it already!
Also, the guys at Penny Arcade have deemed it awesome .. shouldn’t that produce at least 100,000+ in sales?
June 18th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
If Bloom Blox would have sold better on Xbox 360 or PS3, then there’s a problem. Otherwise, blame the baby-looking characters and/or mismarketing.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
When a good game has near zero marketing, the only way it is going to sell is of word to mouth, so 1st month sales mean nothing, let’s hope people talk to their friends how good the game is!!!
June 18th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
0 Marketing?
Dude, Boom Blox has had a lot of marketing!
Magazine and TV ads!
I must see a TV ad for Boom Blox on Cartoon Network at least twice a day!
The fault I see is that the advertising may not have been in the right place – kids today, IMO, don’t have an interest in playing with table puzzles – they want to frag. Very sad, yes, but true.
EA could have spread out the advertising in other magazines and TV channels, as well.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Boom Blox hasn’t sold well because it’s overpriced. Simple as that.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
It pisses me off how wii fans go on about how ppl shouldnt see the system as a 2nd console, and that the system is better when they arent even supporting the console.
This is a great game, my brother got it for his birthday when it came out and the muliplayer has us hooked. So if you are one of the few out there with the game, please spread the word. This titles deserve better attention.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I call BS. I have not purchased Boom Blox. It looks like a good game. I even tried it out today at Six Flags over Georgia and thought it was pretty fun.
But you know what? I don’t buy every single game that comes out. I’m sick of people complaining about games not selling. You know what, there are lots of games. Buy what you want, when you want. Don’t tell me to buy a game because the fate of the universe is at stake.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Yeah, just because a game hasn’t sold a large number of copies doesn’t mean that it’s not good.
I buy every good game that I see on the market (partly cause of my income) – so I can tell other people which games really are the good ones, as well as help new Wii owners find games they will really like!
So I don’t really care about a 60k-only sale, I care about an awesome party game, or in the case of Zack and Wiki, an awesome puzzle-solving game!
June 18th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
@Kevin R.
You don’t have to buy this game. The problem is when you and most other Wii owners don’t buy good 3rd party efforts. Naturally those game developers will put more resources into the 360 and the PS3 where there is more money to be made. That will leave us with yet another Nintendo system where we get quality first party games and almost nothing else.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
This game flopped b/c of the price and box art. The EA marketing department should be bent over for this one.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
The only test that this game failed was the magazine hype test. The media feels like if it is hyped then it should sale. Really I’d rather play wrecking crew on the old NES. The lego block looking characters are a turn off and it has none of the mystery that a real arcade game would have. Seriously if it can’t pass the arcade test and attract people to it then it’s not going to sell.
I may get this game but I may not. This proves nothing! Put quake 3 on the Wii and you better believe it would sale. To me there is not that much action to be had with this game and we already have elibites(sp) you could do almost the same thing.
Fine if EA doesn’t want to put stuff on the system then what ever. I’m hyped about my game list so far. I’ve never been super hyped about bloom blox any way. I will be buying bomber man though that game is ruthless!
June 18th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
@Gausser
Boo hoo, no more 3rd party games. I’m tired of that argument. If a publisher can’t figure out how to make a game sell, don’t blame me.
I was bullied by this “3rd party myth” into buying Zack & Wiki. It’s OK but nothing spectacular. (I felt the same way about Metroid Prime 3 for the record. That game was just plain boring.) Boom Blox is my type of game. I just don’t want to spend $50 on it right now. Maybe in a few months or for Christmas but not now.
I don’t understand why games have to make all of their sales in the first month to be a success. Why can’t we buy the game 3 months later?
If Nintendo wants 3rd parties to succeed, they need to stop releasing such great 1st party games all the time. Between SSBB, Mario Kart Wii, and Wii Fit, I’m tapped out for now.
Besides, am I the only one disappointed with Steven Spielberg’s name on this game? I expected much more from him. A cutesy puzzle game is not what I expect with this name on the box.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
@Kevin R.
Enjoyed those Gamecube days when months went by without a single good realease, did you? There is nothing wrong if a game sells slowly over a long period of time, but that’s generally not how the industry works. Retailers order based on demand. If the game doesn’t start out strongly, it might never get another chance. Games like Okami, No More Heroes and Zack and Wiki are right up there quality-wise with Nintendo’s best. They deserve better sales than they have received so far. Besides third parties don’t need to figure out how to sell their games on Wii since they have already figured it out on the 360. And Wii owners will suffer.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
@Gausser
Nope, never had a Gamecube. Whiners like you make me regret being a Wii owner though.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
@Kevin R.
Not whining. Just stating facts. I suffered through the N64 days too. It’s sad that the Wii has a user base of almost 10 million in the US, but Boom Blox can only move 60 000 copies.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
@Kevin R:
Nintendo’s not responsible for the failure of most 3rd-party titles; those 3rd parties just don’t put as much effort into developing those titles as Nintendo does.
They want to release them fast, and not cause their audience to wait a long time.
Nintendo wants quality titles – and as you saw with Brawl, they are willing to push the release date back so they can provide the gamers, albeit hardcore or casual, with one of the best freakin’ games out there for a Nintendo console!
3rd parties – make as much effort as Nintendo does, and you will have a quality game. Don’t skimp, don’t cut corners, and fix all your bugs!
Then you will sell your dream quantity of games! From a developer to a developer, take note!
June 18th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
It is a puzzle game that looks like Jenga for $50.
Those same $50 could get you a racing game on the Wii, which is why Mario Kart sold 700k more units than Boom Blox.
Also, Carnival Games didn’t sell 1M the first month.
It sold 50k first month.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
@DonWii
I’m with you on both points. Boom Blox is a tough sell. It looks like a kid game which doesn’t help sell it. Same thing with Zack & Wiki.
Carnival Games is the model I’d like to see more 3rd party games follow. Slow, steady sales.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I’m doing a Two Cents in 60 Seconds on this…
June 18th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
The marketing department failed this game. The Wii console and games sell because of mainstream attention – not because of awareness from fringe outlets like online websites or advertisements on Cartoon Network.
The art design team didn’t do this game any favors. I love the game, but looking at the brightly-colored cover doesn’t give me any idea about the quality or gameplay within. (Advertisements are also guilty of failing to show how good the game really is as a party event.)
The pricing is a tough pill to swallow. Wii owners are a cheap bunch. Many of the people talking about how good the game is admit that the $50 price tag feels high, and many of them haven’t actually bought the game for that very reason.
(I rarely pay more than $30 for a Wii game myself, because you can buy a large number of great titles for that price or less and higher priced titles usually see a price drop before long anyway… Zack & Wiki, another good 3rd party title, but was quickly marked down to $20 because of slow sales. Makes the $40 I spent seem kind of silly.)
The release timing didn’t do anything to help early sales, as BOOM BLOX was released close to the mega-hyped Wii Fit. Anyone wonder why Wii Ski sold so well? Piggy-backing on Nintendo’s hype train certainly didn’t hurt!
—
I can justify the failure of No More Heroes as a quirky niche game on a mainstream system. Okami’s slow sales weren’t really a surprise since it had already failed on PS2, despite being a critic’s darling. Even Zack & Wiki bombing is understandable because single-player puzzles aren’t as popular with the casual, party-centric Wii audience…
But BOOM BLOX is a perfect fit for the system. It has intuitive and fun controls, interesting single player puzzles, wonderful (and flexible) multiplayer modes that can be played until your arm gives out, and really is accessible to anyone.
I still hope that people will “discover” this game during the summer months as word of mouth spreads and the price drops a little bit… but I won’t hold my breath. The idea that casual games are “slow burning” because word-of-mouth takes time to spread only holds so much water – and certainly not enough to account for the sales quotas that EA is missing.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
The game is waaaay over priced, what did they expect? That’s asking me to buy a horse adventure game for 50 bucks…you can be damned sure that I wouldn’t even care about how great the game actually gets. Once the price of boom box able to be dropped around 20$, people wouldn’t even able to find a copy, mark my word.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I was surprised to hear how poorly Boom Blox sold, to be honest. I haven’t had the opportunity to play it yet, but I might just have to buy it to show my support for quality 3rd-party Wii games (and I encourage others to buy such games, too).
It is definitely a shame, especially when the casual market won’t bother to pick up a casual game. Honestly, I think this is probably attributed to poor marketing. I’ve seen a Boom Blox commercial twice, at most, and not on the right channel. I think it was Nickelodeon. In reality, games like this should really be pushed to an older audience as well, on channels like Comedy Central or FX or something. I believe the game would have done better this way.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
And with a lower price tag.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
i see this as partly speaking to the wii market, which i continue to read as more casual and less educated (about games) than the ps3 or 360 market.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Doesn’t the average game sell a lot less than 60,000 copies? I’m pretty sure that tons of ‘em don’t even crack 10,000. All the attention is focused on the really big sellers, but there’s a lot of activity way below that level.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I know the game looks interesting, but I don’t want to pay $50 for a game that doesn’t have anywhere close to 50 hours of game play. It’s a $20-$30 game, as fun as it looks. I have picked up Mercury Meltdown Rev and Williams Pinball for both less than $20, and they are great games – when I considered the price I paid for them. No way would I have paid $50.
If production cost is low, sell it low. How else do you think Game Party or whatever sells well. It’s $20!
June 19th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Boom Blox, Zach & Wiki, Okami, No More Heroes….. what do they have in common ?
-Third party
-Cartooney style graphics
-bad marketing
I own Zach&Wiki and Okami, but i don’t think i can handle any more cartooney style games. ‘no more heroes’ lacks polish and Boom Blox is overpriced. Look at the charts for the other consoles… how many ‘cartooney’ games are in thei top 10 ?
Until i as a cas-core gamer see serious effort on the Wii, why should i part with my $$$ ?
While Speilberg makes an ‘epic’ game for the XB360 and PS3, Wii owners get this mini-game-fest with cartooney graphics. Wii owners get shafted yet again…. and they wonder why it didn’t sell well ?
Message to third parties: Put your AAA projects on Wii, and maybe then we can judge whether or not third parties can sell games or not on the Wii.
The reason i like Nintndo Games is because every game has an ‘A-team’ working on them, every game has the production values i expect and none of them feel like an afterthought or a side project.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Dead horse other games are coming and they are worth $50 dollars. Marble madness would be so much cooler on the Wii any way. The game could have had way more going on. Imagine it it used and defend your castle style play with other trying to destroy your castle the fastest. These guys should really try to see if the game play is a hit on Wii ware let us be your test market.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:43 am
i think the main problem is that the marketing does a poor job of explaining what the game is. there’s nothing else like it so a 30 second spot of kids swinging their wiimotes doesn’t come close to showing the best points of the game.
50 bucks is too high for someone wondering whether to get this game, there is alot of variety that is not obvious and the market is full of recognizable charecters and more conventional titles for folks to be drawn too.
marketing should be demoing this game in malls like they did with wiisports.
its real easy to write this game off, until you play it.
all said, christmas time this might be a hit.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:45 am
The Wii market has kept me very busy lately; busy enough that I have to prioritize my purchases. Games that catch my attention are always top of the list. For that reason alone, I mostly ignored Boom Blox. It’s a Jenga game with Spielberg’s name on it. I’m not impressed, especially when I have tons of other games that appeal to me based on genre, gameplay or creativity; games like Blast Works, Castle of Shikigami 3, My Life as a King, LostWinds and TokiTori. Like it or not, WiiWare is serious competition for disc-based games. The proliferation of great DS games is another reason that I haven’t seriously considered Boom Blox.
The problem with the current line of thinking is that most of the games listed are niche games. No More Heroes? It’s a great game but most gamers don’t fully appreciate Grasshopper Manufacture’s efforts (see Killer7 as an example). Zack and Wiki is a point and click which turns off most modern gamers. As these games appeal to a very small part of the gamer community, lower sales are expected and lower sales are required to make the publisher happy. That’s the current market, not just the Wii user base. I bet Zack and Wiki and Boom Blox would have sold even less on the 360 or PS3.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Good points, everyone.
Don’t forget that 60.000 x $50, only in the first month, for a low-budget project is pretty good for any developer.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:38 am
I am shocked at how many people in this thread have written the game off when they clearly don’t know anything about it. Somebody said all you do is build a structure and knock it down. There are a ton of mulitplayer modes and they are all great in groups. There is a pile of replay value and you can create your own levels for those multiplayer modes. The problem with the Wii software sales are guys like the ones on this thread who talk themselves out of good games because they are afraid it would be too kiddie. You guys ever think about renting it. I did and it garnered EA a sale. I enjoy the game and I recommend it for at the very least a rental. As for sales, unless you have some foolish investment in who becomes the market leader in the console market who cares. The only sale of a game I worry about is the one that I am involved in. All these guys who talk about suffering through the Gamecube days or whatever should have both systems and then your concerns would be lifted. This is all silly. I hope the Wii loses so that I can just enjoy it for what it is not what it represents in market share.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
“… Games that catch my attention are always top of the list. For that reason alone, I mostly ignored Boom Blox. It’s a Jenga game with Spielberg’s name on it. I’m not impressed, especially when I have tons of other games that appeal to me based on genre, gameplay or creativity; …”
- nil
Hunter is right.
It’s disappointing to see how many people have written this game off without trying it or even knowing much about the game – especially since Boom Blox is much deeper and more interesting than any boxart or screenshot can communicate. Consumer ignorance is just another indicator of how poor the marketing was, I’d say.
Oh well. For everyone who writes this game off without playing it, they are the ones missing out.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
In this here long line of comments, I’m sure someone mentioned that Game Party has been out since November.
I’m sure the game has legs unlike Zack & Wiki, which I can see how people would never ever bother to rent it.
June 21st, 2008 at 10:20 pm
I would’ve bought it if it were priced at $30-$40 range.