This is the kind of gaming generation we live in. Gamespot reports from a recent interview with Iwata during Nintendo’s Q1 Results report, that among some expected tidbits of information from him (no Wii price cut yet, next console ain’t coming for a long time) was his acceptance that last Holiday’s lineup for the Wii was, in their eyes at least a bit of a floundered opportunity. Notably the fact that Wii Music and Animal Crossing (the two games the company heralded the 2008 Holiday season with) while two and three million sellers respectively, just didn’t join the ranks of some their other games this generation in terms of sales. When you compare those two games to Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii which sold 21 million and 17 million units respectively, then yeah what used to be impressive numbers just don’t seem that great at a glance.

But this is something the whole industry is dealing with this generation, the phenomenon of gaming being at it’s peak for so many, that the games that do surprisingly well at retail seem worse now by comparison.

Lemme move away from Nintendo and focus on some third party examples on other consoles just to show that this isn’t unique to any specific area. Call of Duty: World at War sold eleven million copies by this past June. That’s eleven million copies of what some would call just a “yearly sequel” in the grand scheme of things, gamers bought the last iteration, they’ll buy the next iteration, just another entry for the books. Look back to just a a generation or two ago and see how different things were when it came to defining a title’s success through sales. A lot of the games we remember these days as classics everybody had to have played seem like mere “semi-successes” if you don’t take into account that the market was smaller back in the early 90′s.

But then even when the Playstation came to bring genres like RPGs to the masses it was a phenomenon when Final Fantasy VII sold as much as it did. FF7 just broke the 10 million mark in copies of the original game sold thanks to the PSN release and the constant 10th year anniversary marketing Square keeps up with. Just 10 million copies. It was finally able to reach a milestone that certain games these days, the ones that find themselves in the right place, at the right time, with all the right qualifications, can pass in just under a year.

So I guess where I’m getting with this is, in the end, what’s going to happen to those games currently in development that we’re all waiting for if they only sell two or three million copies? Psychonauts is remembered for being a slow cooker on the sales spectrum, never even getting to the one million mark. Here Tim Schafer says as of 2007 Psychonauts managed to sell 700,000 units. Even last generation you could make a good case for the title not being a total flop sales wise, 700,000 is a hella lotta people when you think about it.

But this gen, where games are expected to sell in the millions like parents expect their kids to at least get higher than a “C” on their report cards, what’s gonna happen to the games that can’t even cross that milestone, let alone being able to sit at the big kid’s table with Call of Duty 5, Guitar Hero 4, Mario Kart 5, and all the other big fish? – The Ben