El Chavo's launch
In late 2011, news broke that Televisa was planning to make an El Chavo video game for Nintendo's Wii console, where El Chavo and his friends would be transported to a board game via a magic book. Televisa hired Kaxan Media Group, a rookie developer who made mobile phone games. The planned release was in spring 2012, due to the little experience of the developer Kaxan Media Group and the development of less than a year, various details and mechanics party games could not be included in time.
If you want to know more about the retail game itself, see the main article. This article is only about the troubled development.
Why The Game Was Rushed
Televisa had the idea of making a party video game based on El Chavo Animado, which at the time was a good source of income. The game began its development in some time of 2011, and it was going to be released in spring of 2012. Televisa decided to choose Kaxan Media Group as a developer, famous for making Taco Master and gave them little time to do so, which at that time was a rookie company that made mobile games. Due to the little time that Televisa gave to Kaxan Media Group, the game had a huge shortage of content that most compared it to a Nintendo 64 game and Televisa had the idea of selling the game at a full price, so it was less accessible to some people, due to this and almost no publicity of it whatsoever, it ended up selling little. Furthermore, because people were focusing on Mario Party 9, which came out almost on par with the game (exactly a month apart). After the failure of the game, Televisa hired Efecto Studios to made a racing video game based on El Chavo, creating El Chavo Kart, which was also a failure in sales due to poor advertising and it was generally seen as a Mario Kart rip-off. Due to low sales, El Chavo Kart can cost $60, the price of a modern AAA game due to how rare it is to find a copy in a decent state, also El Chavo for Wii was not released outside of Mexico and Brazil, so it can cost $50[1] on Amazon.com.
Reception
The game received mostly mixed-to-negative reviews from critics, with more negative reception from players. On LevelUp!, it received a score of 6/10[2] by Daniel Dehesa, due to little variety of mini-games, almost no dialogue, insufficient explanations for certain challenges, repetitive music, the artificial intelligence and the little content, also saying "From the first time you play it, it is evident that the concept gave much more, especially since the aesthetics are attractive, apart from the graphic deficiencies. In the end, the collection of minigames is somewhat inconsistent, and had it delivered a more fierce competition, in which the characters' antics became more apparent, it may have resulted in a considerably more fun concept; who knows, maybe the design got out of hand". Some reviewers on YouTube were much critical with the game and gave it lower scores, like Zebitas Martinex, who considered the Wii version unacceptable for Wii standards due of its flaws, with a small warmer reception for the Android and iOS version, despite being critical on the bad controls. Red Shock Inc in his gameplay said that the minigames were mostly quite boring, the controls were bad and the AI was mediocre.
Impact
The game was poorly received mainly by players due to the small amount of content, which was disappointing because at launch it cost 599 pesos/coins , which is in 45 U.S. dollars. From 2012 to 2015, it was used as a joke and usually known for being a disgrace to El Chavo del Ocho (and video games in Mexico in general) or being one of the worst Party games of the Wii. The game was so catastrophically awful that if left a permanent bad stain in the video game industry in Mexico, considering that they where not going to achieve much because most games where either commercial failures or just shovelware tried to make a quick buck, although some developers have tried to improve it (like Elliot Quest and Kerbal Space Program), they didn't not managed to cover the stain that the game left and still people see the video game industry in Mexico in the same way. Due to the failure of two games and the decline in popularity of El Chavo Animado, no more games were made since then except for a couple of mobile games.