Is the Wii doomed?

[shams]

Hi again all... {shams puts his fighting gloves on}

mkozlows said: 1. The PS3 and 360 are approximately similar hardware, such that a game developed for one of systems is easily ported to the other. But the Wii isn't like that; a game developed for the Wii can't be trivially ported from the PS3/360 version (note that no Wii ports of next-gen-only titles exist right now, for instance). ...

Not at all. Firstly, the Wii will *always* be easier to develop than either the 360 or PS3. Secondly, its a lot easier to scale a game "back" than scale it up (and end up with a decent title). Thirdly, all that PS2 dev tech is still around - its not like its been thrown out the window forever.

2. Right now, the Wii's getting a free ride due to the enduring success of the PS2. People knock the third-party Wii library for producing a lot of PS2 ports, but those only exist because the Wii is a trivial port target for PS2 games in the way that the PS3/360 are for each other. This is fine right now, while the PS2 is still a going concern, but two years from now, there won't be a PS2 to amortize development costs with.

Nope. What will happen is simple - since the Wii is *more* cost effective to develop for than either the 360 or PS3 - you put one, small dev team on Wii projects - and they develop new games based on existing engines, sequels or more. Sure, there may be less big-budget, mega-titles developed for the Wii - but this may not matter in the end.

3. The combination of the top two points means that the Wii has to earn its keep with third-party titles, and has to sell enough all by itself to make them worth it for publishers. But this is where those February numbers come in: First-party software for the Wii is MASSIVELY outselling third-party software right now, by a lot. It doesn't appear that Wii buyers are interested in bread-and-butter third-party titles. Which makes sense for two reasons: 1) A lot of Wii buyers are multi-platform owners, and if you have a choice between buying a game on the 360 (with next-gen graphics, HD support, online capability, achievements, etc.) or buying it on the Wii (prev-gen graphics, no HD, no real online), you're going to buy it on the 360; 2) People who are hardcore gamers mostly bought the Wii for the first-party franchises -- Mario, Zelda, Metroid -- while people who aren't traditional gamers (the alleged grandmas and girlfriends) just don't buy that many games, and are even less likely to buy Unreal 3 or GTA, even if they did exist on the Wii.

There is no doubt that this is generally true with all Nintendo platforms, but you are missing the point here. If the Wii becomes the dominant platform, sheer economics ensure a huge amount of 3rd platform support. Even the GC still maintained a large 3rd party development base (to this day), and the Wii is out-doing that several times over already. There have been several press releases about publishers shifting development resources TO the Wii (from the 360 / PS3) - not the other way around. The GC lost out because it was "stuck in the middle". The Wii carves out its own gaming niche, giving publishers extra reason to develop skews for the Wii (as it gives their games a whole different feel - for the most part).

4. The result of the top three means that third-party game support on the Wii is likely to be even worse than it was on the GameCube (which was a trivial port between the PS2 and Xbox), and more in line with the N64. ...

To date, this is completely wrong - and I think you'll find the pattern continues. The Wii will get the strongest 3rd-party support Nintendo has raked in since the SNES. The DS/Wii analogies all still hold. As long as Wii titles are cheaper to develop than 360 or PS3 skews, its almost certain that 3rd-party support will flourish. You guys here are looking at a *very* one-sided part of the equation. Unit sales are great and all... but also take into account: - profit per unit sold (i.e. manufacturing or other costs) - title development costs - general development costs (devkit costs, licensing, etc). There is also another *major* factor - marketing costs. Say you spend 20mill on development of a big brand title - this is usually matched by about the same amount of cash spend on marketing. When you do this, skews become even MORE important - as the additional development cost for an additional skew is almost irrelevant compared to the marketing budget. As a result, you almost *always* want to hit every platform that is available for you to hit. And for 3rd-party publishers, this will almost always include the Wii. Just watch what EA does over the next 12 months.