They Don't Care About Us
Written By Stephen Heller
The journey of an Australian Wii Gamer has been a long and bumpy road, full of ridiculously late release dates (RE: Super Smash Bros Brawl) lack of “hardcore” titles, and things don’t seem to be shaping up to brighter horizons. Nintendo have just announced news regarding release dates for the highly anticipated Punch Out!!! and the new racing title Excitebots
That news is there is no release date, in fact the games aren’t even being picked up by local retailers. Excitebots sales have been dismal at best in the USA, so Nintendo Australia has made the judgement not to bring it into the country.
Punch Out!!! devotees will have to travel to their nearest JB-Hi Fi store as they will be the only stockists of the game in Australia. Rose Lappin, managing director of of Nintendo Australia issued this statement.
To be honest we didn’t have a lot of requests for the game,” she continued. “There’s a few people… there’s a lot of noise but not a lot of sales, that sort of thing. However there was one retailer that was chasing it, so that’s why we’ve decided to go that way. Of course, if it continues and consumers want it then that’s what we’re here for. At the end of the day if we don’t support consumers then we don’t have a business. We’re certainly here to work with what people want.”
Nintendo sure are giving people what they want....IF they live near a JB-Hi Fi store. For those of us in rural areas who don’t have a JB-Hi Fi within 100kms from our homes, it’s going to result in an inconvenient process to get the game.
It begs the question will this become a common trend with Nintendo First Party releases? Will we be faced with late releases, or in some cases no release at all, totally dictated by sales in the USA?
Is the global economic crisis putting so much pressure on the industry that it’s harder for publishers to take risks? Instead of taking these risks will publishers just choose to not release games on our shores to avoid the possibility of bad sales?
Due to Nintendo’s strict region coding importing titles aren’t as easy as it is for PC or the Playstation 3. If this becomes a popular trend many Wii gamers could miss out on their most anticipated games, due to sales in another country....
Do Nintendo really care about us?
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