Times are tough. Though the videogame industry seems to be recession proof, publishing houses are still reporting routine quarterly losses. Take a look at the state of Midway and you will realize that all is not fine and dandy for a videogame company right now.

This article by The New York Times provides an investigative look as to why this is occurring, including commentary by none other than Reggie Fils-Aime. Reggie offers that part of the issue could be the fact that it takes about 1 million units sold before a game turns a profit for the development studio on his console the Wii. Timeout, ONE MILLION UNITS? According to the times article, only 16 games have reached this plateau, nine of which are first party developed games.

I'm going to give you five good minutes to try to figure out all of the problems with those figures. Go on don't let me ruin the fun, I remember how loud I shouted "WHAT!?!?!?" when i first read the article, you do the same. Have you collected the socks that just blew off your feet, good, on to some 8BitHD investigative reporting.

One million units sounds like an awful lot of sales just to turn a profit. If that is truly the case, on the platform that is supposedly the cheapest to develop on, why are games like Imagine Baby Parties and Carnival Games over-saturating the Wii market? I feel like there is an endless supply of mini-game compilations on the Wii right now, and I bet none of them sell 1 million copies.

Lets head over to Wikipedia, where they have a comprehensive list of all of the games that have sold over 1 million copies on the Wii. 1...2...3...32 games over that mark? Double the amount the New York Times reported on. Now who am I going to believe? In this situation, I am going to have to side with wikipedia, only because they link me to the official company statements and sales reports where these numbers came from. Oh and it appears I'm wrong, Carnival Games sold 1.5 million copies, go figure.

I don't know what the angle is here, but the Regginator has some explaining to do. If you really have to sell one million units to make a profit, why does anybody bother, and why did that article only account for half of the games that have reached that milestone?

The point of this long winded article is that if this statistic is to be believed, it can add fuel to many (my) fire that it really is true that games aren't as good as they used to be. Theorists explain that because it is much tougher to survive in the market, and a AAA title is not guaranteed to sell, there are two courses of action. Create shovelware, or go the dignified route of not bothering at all. Now I am in no way insinuating that there is an abundance of shovelware or a disparity of quality titles available for the wii, but...