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Degausser on 14 January 2011
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RolStoppable said:
Degausser said:

 Looking at the VGC figures I don't think it's hard to see the PSP had a better track record at selling Split Second type racers though. Clearly it has an audience, even if software sales have dried up it's still shown on numerous occations these realstic (In the loosest sense of the word) type racers can sell, whereas the Wii has a list of half a million sellers and a few slightltly above that which were released close to the consoles launch. 

 Neither really boasted amazing selling opportunities - but a handheld game is still the cheaper option which requires less resources and people working on it. I can't really get into a debate on the technology behind porting a video game, but from what I've gathered these PSP games which are on 360/PS3 (Dante's Inferno, Split Second, Army of Two) arn't literal ports of the PS3/360 but indepentely developed games that share alot of resources and that doing a similiar thing on the Wii (At an acceptable quality) would simply cost more money.

 Fair enough if just Disney did it (PSP port) and it was a one off occation but we've seen it happen on numerous occations now from EA, Namco, Konami etc, so I'm assuming there's got to be some sort of technological logic in it.

I find it hard to believe that publishers would be oblivious to the fact that the average quality of a third party PSP racing game was notably higher than their Wii counterparts. If you are going to make an SD version of a HD game, you might as well release it on the Wii as a straight port from the PSP version. oniyide makes the point that these PSP versions of HD games are mediocre, but then again, when has it ever been an issue for third parties to release games of questionable quality for the Wii?

There is no technological logic behind this. The very same third parties had no problem to quickly port PS2 games to the Wii early on. It really doesn't take a lot of effort to port between PS2/PSP/Wii and out of these three systems, as time passed by, the Wii easily became the platform with the highest potential for sales. Once again, if you go through the trouble to make an SD version of a HD game, you might as well make it available on all viable platforms (and the Wii is more viable than the PSP).

 I know what you're saying, but this isn't a one off in Disney's case and so I'm leading myself to believe that there must be more of a reason that these games hit the PSP and not Wii. You said it yourself, publishers happily ported some PS2 / PSP games, so why not these ones? There must be more of a reason then simply because they hate the Wii or something - and I'm trying to reason that. 

 From what I've seen, with alot of the titles on every platform like movie tie ins, the Wii / PS2 / PSP version is often develoepd by an entirely different studio to the PS3 / 360 / PC. Thus my logic is whereas a small team of people at Blackrock can get a PSP version up and running on minimal budget - to make an SD version which runs on the console would require more people, more money and as shown in other instances may require the hiring of another studio altogether. 

 So my guess is whereas 'downscaling' from PS2 / Wii to PSP is cheap and easy, maybe going the other way isn't? I don't really know enough about game technology to say so can anyone with a better knowledge help? I'm going off what I read and see, and while lots of Wii / PS2 games appear on PSP, I can't think of many previous PSP exclusives going in the opposite direction - aside from a few Sony games which were likely developed with the plan for porting all along.

 Publisher like money, and if putting these PSP games on the Wii was as easy as you let on, then they'd port them just like they did with the various PS2 ports at launch and whatever else.