Report: Hardcore Wii games sell poorly

Wii at AngleA new report by the New York Times says “new Wii games find a big (but stingy) audience” and questions why some retailers are having so much trouble selling Wii games. From the article:

Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It was one the most hotly anticipated video games of the year; it sold more than 1.4 million copies during the first week of its release, in early March, and broke records for Nintendo of America… But sales dropped more than 90 percent over the first four weeks, according to estimates from VG Chartz, a team of analysts who study video-game sales. Some major retail chains ’ including Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us ’ have already begun bundling the Smash Bros. game with Wii machines for sales online, a sign that the base of hard-core gamers who went looking for the game has been depleted.

It would be interesting to see a proper comparison of under performing Xbox 360 and PS3 games to determine if Wii titles are really selling abnormally slow. Critically-acclaimed commercial flops have always existed in video games, no? But has Wii complicated the problem?

[Thanks, Dustin!]