Who cares if M-rated Wii games do or don't sell? We've crunched numbers in our latest Wii Stats Report to learn how much the people who get these games actually play them. MadWorld included.
Last week, we showed you the 10 most-played gamers, per gamer, on the Wii.
Few people could have been surprised that there was just one M-rated game on the list. M-rated games just aren't the Wii's big thing.
But there are M titles on the Wii. And, even if they don't sell a ton or get played a lot, people do play them.
The chart above pulls data from the Wii's Nintendo Channel (full explanation of our methodology below) and shows the current average total playing time of all of the M-rated games listed. Yes, that's all of them. For some reason, the Nintendo Channel does not list Resident Evil 4 or Manhunt 2, both of which would have been nice to include on the list.
It shouldn't be hard to figure out why Call of Duty: World at War takes top honors. The game has online multiplayer. The other games listed here do not. Will MadWorld creep up on this list the longer it is out? Only if it provides reason for those who own it to return to it. The same is true for all these games.
Note the amount of playing time commanded by the two most GTA-like games on the list. Wii gamers dig into the Godfathers and Scarfaces. Should that matter to Rockstar? Or is sales potential — not the amount of time a game would be played — the only metric worth reacting to?
Where's all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good. We calculate it by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 62 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users, for an average of 27.84 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.2 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 2.2 million people are contributing stats. That is up from 2.1 million people when these numbers were ran for April 1.