Carnival Games goes platinum
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 7:46pm by Derek
VG Chartz is reporting Carnival Games has surpassed one million copies sold worldwide.
Released in Aug. 2007, the exclusive Wii minigame collection has since exceeded virtually all sales expectations despite receiving mediocre review scores. Carnival Games is currently averaging an aggregate score of 56 on Metacritic.
Carnival Games was developed by Washington-based Cat Daddy Games, a studio primarily focused on PC games, and published by Global Star Software. G4TV reported a rumor on Jan. 17 that a sequel may be in development for a 2008 release.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Friggin pathetic.
Why don’t good third-party games like Zack and Wiki sell this well?
February 12th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Why did this game do so well? Because Take-Two bothered to advertise it.
TV commercials, as well as permanent movie reel in WalMarts, made this title known to the masses.
Why don’t good third-party games sell?
Because they aren’t advertised.
Sonic and the Secret Rings was advertised and it sold, like, 750k units.
Boogie and Nights were advertised, but their commercials didn’t really show much of the game/what the game was, so the marketing flopped.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Just goes to show.
The ” Casual gamer” market, which the Wii has an enormous amount of, cant tell a good game from a pissy A$$ poor one.
Yet another reason why 3rd party games on the Wii are mostly garbage. Why WOULD a developer spend the development time, resources and most importantly money making a very cool ” hardcore” Wii game when all they have to do is poop out a fast, cheap game that the ” Casuals market” will buy up like fools.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Yeah…. not all the poop sells. Just the well advertised poop.
I haven’t seen Game Party, Pool Party, and tons of other crappy minigame collections sell well.
You only hear about Carnival Games because, again, it was well advertised.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I really don’t get why publisher don’t put the time and effort into promoting good games. This game was crap, but because it was advertised so much, it managed to move a million units.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
What wii wii said. Someone actually came in and asked to reserve Summer Sports: Paradise Island. I’ve never heard of it before, but apparently it’s yet another mini-game compilation. Who would have thought?
February 12th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Maybe the sequel will allow you to use non-Caucasian avatars.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
A true travesty
February 12th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
filed under ‘cas-core’???
you’re kidding. this has ‘casual’ all over it.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:46 am
My parents bought this game for me for Christmas. I never would have even considered buying it myself. It’s not horrible, but one million copies? That sorta makes me cringe.
February 13th, 2008 at 3:39 am
Some of you guys are incredible. First you whine and cry about not enough games taking advantage of the unique controller of the Wii, then when a game comes along and does just that, you still whine and cry about it. The fact is that almost no other game that has been released so far for the Wii has taken advantage of the Wii’s controller as much as this game has.
There are what, about 24 different mini-games in this game and almost every one of them uses the controller in a different way.
Personally I think this is a great game. Sure there are a lot of areas that it can improve in (hopefully if there is a CG’s 2, it will deal with some of those things), but you should be thankfull for games like this that are helping to pave the way for even better games in the future.
Thankfully there are close to a million people who disagree with you, including me.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:27 am
joshdad, we don’t whine about games not taking advantage of the wii controller. we used to whine about there not being enough good games that took advantage of the wii controller, but now we have metroid prime 3 and medal of honor: heroes 2 and mario galaxy and mario kart wii soon to come – the list goes on.
the real problem with the wii is that too many casual gamers can’t tell a good game from a bad game, so they buy whatever they think looks “neat.” therefore, third-party companies in particular don’t have any incentive to spend extra money making good games (gems like zack and wiki) and can spend very little money making a game and more money advertising.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:49 am
this is insanity. it just shows the market of most wii owners. Pitiful….:[
February 13th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Maybe for some people (none of us, obviously) carnival games is actually a very good game? We should stop thinking that only we know the truth, and start listening to the majority. I won’t buy GC, never, but I respect people that buy it (I mean, they aren’t just a million of poorly informed people).
February 13th, 2008 at 8:41 am
^GC = CG
February 13th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I wish you guys would try this game before you bash it. I bought it and had a lot of fun with it. Is it a masterpiece? No, but it isn’t horrible either.
I complain that other podcasts (1up Yours) complain about Wii games before they even try them. I’d expected a little more from Infendo.
Carnival Games selling 1 million is nothing but a good thing. People complain that the wii lucrative for 3rd parties. Well, this is proving them wrong.
If you don’t want to play it, don’t. but don’t look at this as a sign of the apocalypse.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I agree with cdub: Do we really know if this is a bad game for a fact? It is a collection of mini-games, for sure, but a lot of Wii owners are looking for just that.
On the other hand, if you are a developer and you have a fixed budget to create and launch a game, do you set aside more money for development and less for advertising, or the other way around? Probably equal parts of advertising and development in your budget is the way to go with a console that has a big install base as the Wii.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Have any of you who are bashing this game ever even PLAYED it? I have both this and Zack and Wiki, and you know what? I’ve logged more time playing Carnival Games than I have playing Z&W so far (I like both, but I find myself popping in CG more often between the two). Sure, CG is as about as deep as an inflatable pool, but after a long, hard day it’s just fun to unwind with a couple games of virtual Skeeball or Dunk Tank for a few minutes. Honestly, what’s so wrong with that? The game has pretty decent graphics and a cool, retro feel to it as well.
This just irks me. It’s like when a stellar TurboGrafx 16 title gets released on the VC and people instantly call it garbage just because they’ve never heard of it before.
CG is worth taking a look at if you in any way enjoyed Wii Sports. If you didn’t, then stick to other games but don’t immediately decry a game just because you feel threatened that a “casual” game is making money on the Wii. If something isn’t your cup of tea, that doesn’t instantly mean it’s a cup of crap.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
[...] VIA infendo [...]
February 13th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I have played it….and I think it sucks. I don’t think anyone should be overly happy that this is the face of one of the best selling third party games. It’s not the worst shovelware I’ve played, but it’s stiill shovelware. And it having success only encourages more crap games like it.
Hey it sold well, congrats to them, but I just get an image of them all laughing their heads off saying “Wow….they actually liked this crap?”
February 14th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
No, no, Joshdad’s got a point… I mean, leeching blood paved the way for more modern medical sciences, so we really should all use those and be grateful that people were horribly wrong with a concept, and honor it.