14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few hours ago, I hit the go button for the article on 124 games for the Wii and DS, wondering if any of those 45 titles for the Wii (yes that makes 79 for the DS) would be Virtual Console titles. We may have just found our answer, as Wired's Chris Kohler points out, that Virtual Console game sales are actually declining.
Until now, Nintendo's Internet service for the Wii has sold 3.3 million games. That's 1.5 million games in the first two months of its releases and 1.8 in the last three months. This only means that gamers aren't exactly crazy about NEO-GEO titles and other mini-craps (and I'm not surprised one bit), while the user base of the system continues to increase on a regular basis.
Naturally, if anyone still gave a damn about what VC provides, the number of sold VC games would have been close to the number of users. But that's hardly the case and if Chris Koehler saw that, you bet your refrigerator that Nintendo saw that too, which means that no, or not many VC games are to be expected among with the 45 upcoming Wii titles.
Then again, why should they? Nintendo made their numbers on practically every launched game (some of them even sold more than Nintendo could produce), so just letting VC hang like a fishing pole and hook is the practical thing for Nintendo. Figures however, show a dramatical drop in VC game sales, so again, not to worry about those upcoming Wii titles. As for the DS, I'm sure it's going to be the usual: tons of puzzlers, Zelda, Pokemon (Pearl and Diamond have just been released but it's never enough), Donkey Kong maybe (on demand) and so on.