When the authors of Wired’s Game|Life blog made the Wii’s poor third-party support their biggest disappointment of 2007, they gave voice to a misgiving I’ve felt since I got the console in late 2006. Namely: Where are all the games?

The Game|Life piece matched my general sense of the Wii’s software offerings, but I wondered if the Wii was the victim of unreasonable expectations. The console’s pre-production code name was “Revolution,” and while that moniker is gone, the spirit supposedly remains. The Wii was and is supposed to revolutionize gaming. So are the Wii’s games really that much worse than the ones available for other consoles? Or are we simply asking too much of Wii, the anointed savior of play?

To find out, I went to Metacritic, a site that compiles reviews and assigns each game a “Metascore” based on its overall critical reception. The Metascore operates on a scale from 1 to 100—for instance, the acclaimed shooter Gears of War received a 94, while lame sequel Time Crisis 4 managed only a 61. To judge games on a console-by-console basis, I loaded every Metascore for Wii, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 games into a spreadsheet and did some basic statistical analysis.

A few notes on the data. The scores were obtained from Metacritic.com on Jan. 3, 2008. I chose Metacritic over similar sites, most notably Game Rankings, for a number of reasons: Metacritic’s data is easier to access and interpret, it uses a weighted average that reduces the influence of less reputable reviewers, and I am dazzled by the Metascores’ bright primary colors. Reviews and Metascores for downloadable games are patchy, so I excluded them from the analysis. These numbers are shrink-wrap only. If you cannot abide the fact that SpongeBob SquarePants Underpants Slam! will not contribute to the Xbox 360 results, you should stop reading now.

The obvious first step is to average the scores, and clearly the “Wii games stink” hypothesis still has legs. The gap between PS3 and Xbox is marginal, but the Wii is a significant laggard, its games averaging almost 10 points less than PS3 games.

Are a few outlying stinkers dragging down the mean? After all, the Wii has some downright bombs—Anubis II’s Metascore of 19 is easily the lowest in this survey.¹ Sorry, Wii fans: using the median score, which reduces the effect of outliers, the picture is similar:

Neither chart tells us much. Sure, the Wii gets a lower score on average, but that could be a factor of reviewer bias. Remember, the Wii is supposed to be radically innovative. The games might be entertaining in a new way that delights Joe Lunchpail but doesn’t score as well on the traditional gameplay-graphics-sound metrics of game journalism. In other words, maybe the reviewers just don’t get it, and the Wii’s overall score gets dinged as a result.

To squeeze some more info out of the data, I used a basic grading system:
Metascore of 90-100: A
80-89: B
70-79: C
60-69: D
50-59: F
0-50: F-minus

F-minus may seem harsh, but on Metacritic, scores below 50 are outlined in bright red, nature’s warning to keep your distance from a dangerously crappy game. I had Excel generate a histogram for each console to see what percentage of games fell into each grade level. Here’s the report card.

I hope the Wii has a good safety school. “Failing” scores account for a staggering one-third of the Wii library; the “D” chunk takes up another 30 percent.

The most striking difference, though, is in the “B” range. The Wii manages to eke out about the same proportion of universally acclaimed “A” games as its competitors, but the “B” bar for the Wii is just a sliver compared to the other two consoles. The Wii has its share of great games, but the field of very good games is stunningly sparse. If the Wii’s problem is that game reviewers don’t get it, they must really not be getting it.

Isolate Nintendo’s titles from the rest of the Wii pack,² and we get confirmation that third parties are indeed dragging the scores down. Given Nintendo’s reputation, it’s no shock that their titles outclass the field by far. Perhaps the only surprise is that the Big N isn’t perfect. One of its games, Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, even cracks the F-minus mark.

What about the PS3 and Xbox? Judging by the charts above, the PS3 seems to have the better library. But those charts only show percentages. If you were paying close attention, alarm bells went off when you saw the big “n” number next to the Xbox 360 line. The older Xbox’s library is triple that of the PS3. Here’s what happens when we ditch percentages and look at the raw quantity of games for each platform:

Proportional numbers are interesting indicators, but they’re only relevant if you choose your games at random. I assume you’re a bit more discriminating, so all other things being equal, would you rather have the system that has 65 “B or better” games, or the one with 32? Who cares about the dregs—you’re not going to bother with them anyway. Hence the Xbox 360 looks a lot better when quantity is put in the mix.

(Note: I’m not trying to push one console over the other here, as library size is just one of many considerations that go into a purchase. For the record, I own a Wii and a PS3, but not an Xbox.)

None of the charts give an edge to the Wii, so why does the Wii outsell its competitors so handily? Two reasons—one obvious, one a little less obvious, and neither revolutionary.

1. The Wii is cheap. The Wii sells for only $250, making it the bargain choice. Most people will never take advantage of the other systems’ larger offering of quality games. They just want to play two or three fun games and get on with their lives. Thus the Wii is the best value proposition. Casual gamers are nothing new, though. At the moment, they happen to gravitate toward the affordable Wii (or the Playstation 2, which still sells very well).

2. The Wii comes with Wii Sports. The importance of Wii Sports has been obscured by credulous media reports that have lapped up the Nintendo PR line that the Wii itself is a revolutionary device that boasts world-changing innovation. It’s not about the device, though. It never is. It’s about the game.

Of the four “A” games in the Wii lineup, one is a rehash of an old Gamecube game—Resident Evil 4—and the other three are sequels to ancient Nintendo series: Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Superb, clever games all, yet in terms of gameplay, they rely on very familiar mechanics. Am I supposed to believe that the newest Zelda is so different from its predecessors that Mom and Pop are falling over themselves to play it?

Of course not. Metroid Prime 3 appeals to the same audience that bought Metroid Prime 2. The Wii demand is fueled by Wii Sports³, a game that does have broad appeal, because it truly is different from what has come before. For all the reports of senior citizens taking to the Wii—and there have been many—the seniors seem to only play one game: Wii Sports. My mother-in-law eagerly tried out Wii Sports when I brought the Wii over for Christmas, despite a longstanding aversion to technology. Most Wii owners have a story like this, and 99% of them revolve around Wii Sports.

When the Harry Potter series was exploding in popularity, well-meaning parents and educators predicted it would spark a long-term growth in adolescent reading. It didn’t. Now Nintendo acolytes are predicting that the widespread popularity of Wii Sports will spark long-term growth of the audience for games. It won’t. It’s a new market, but a very shallow one.

The new audiences clamoring to play the Wii aren’t buying into some grand concept of gaming; they’re just excited by a really cool game. Perhaps if the Wii lineup were full of truly innovative, games like Wii Sports, things would be different, but as it stands, Sports stands practically alone. The rest of the games for Wii are motion-enhanced versions of familiar tropes or just plain crap (or both).

The original Nintendo Entertainment System really did spark a revolution, so gamers are understandably eager to see it happen again. The Wii doesn’t quite qualify; the video-game medium looks much the same as it did before the Wii arrived. Still, look at the data above, and look at the real-world results. With little more than savvy pricing and a well-designed pack-in game, Nintendo made a juggernaut out of a console that ought to have landed at the rear of the pack. It’s not a revolution, but I’m guessing it’s close enough for Big N.

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1. Balls of Fury for Wii has gone lower yet, posting a 14 since I gathered my data. (Return to text)

2. I considered those games on which Nintendo is listed as the publisher to be the “first-party” titles in this analysis. (Return to text)

3. There are a few games that strive to match the no-frills family-friendly action of Wii Sports, such as Wii Play or Madden 08. But Wii Play is much less fun than Sports, and Madden 08 is still a bit much for non-football fans, so it would be hard to make the case that they play much part in driving the Wii craze. (Return to text)