The real reason why 3rd party games do not sell well on Nintendo hardware

[cyberninja45]

Scoobes said:

cyberninja45 said:

Scoobes said:

cyberninja45 said:

Scoobes said:
Wow, confirmation bias and elitism in a single post, lol.

I disagree. Different audiences and market segments influence thrid-party sales rather than anything to do with actual game quality. Recent Nintendo consoles have sold predominantly to the wider audience as well as core Nintendo fans who will happily buy the next iteration of Mario or Zelda.

Funnily enough, third party games do sell on Nintendo consoles, just not in the genres traditionally associated with core gaming. On the Wii the likes of Just Dance, Zumba fitness, Lego: Star Wars, Carnival games, EA Sports active and Cooking Mama are all third party franchises that have sold millions. Like I said before, market segments influence third-party sales, not game quality.

@bolded So you are saying that there is no market for 3rd party sales on a nintendo console because they are a different market from the other console? So how does a game like RE4 (which is a high quality 3rd party game) manage to sell 2 mil copies on the wii if the market is not there?

Yes nintendo consoles do cater to a wider audience also.

It's present, but smaller compared to HD consoles + PC and less relevant from a publisher POV. When a publisher can produce a Just Dance game that sells >5 million and with a cheaper budget then a new RE, they're going to take that route.

Take shooters for instance. The Wii got a few shooters early in its life cycle (CoD3, a few Medal of Honors, Red Steel), but even with the marketing (especially for Red Steel), the lack of competition (especially as Nintendo don't have a traditional FPS- you seem to suggest this is why third party games don't sell, right?) and even with the rapidly expanding userbase the Wii had in its first 2 years, they were still low selling titles when comapred to the likes of Resistance or Gears of War.

Sales are still determined more by market segments than by the games quality. More importantly perhaps, the early sales on the Wii demonstrated that the audience was more heavily skewed towards party games and platformers with dance and fitness taking off a couple of years later. This is where third parties have had the most success.

I agree that the market is smaller than HD consoles+PC , but it was still there and still profitable from a publisher POV.

I am not sure I understand your second paragraph correctly but Red Steel was not a well made game if that is what you were implying.

Neither was Resistance (relatively low meta score), or the original Assassins Creed (OK, not a shooter, but the principle is the same... I'm simply using it here because it's also from Ubisoft, had decent marketing and was released early in the gen). Heavy marketing, little competition and being an early release exclusive on the best selling console at the time all pointed to Red Steel selling well and finding a decent share of the market. However, it didn't sell particularly well especially when compared to similar titles on the HD twins, and other shooters on the console didn't fare so well either.

As I mentioned to Fordy earlier, the Wii was in a difficult position for 3rd parties. Not only was it underpowered but it also had an older chip architecture meaning porting of core games to Wii was much harder than porting between 360, PS3 & PC. Most publishers obviously thought they would have difficulty in making money from a Wii version otherwise we would have seen more core games on the console.

The majority of games would have to be built from the ground up for the older architecture on Wii rather than a cheaper porting job. Justifying a Wii version when it was effectively like making a second game (and engine) and with all previous data suggesting the market size would be the smallest of all the 3-4 versions meant the Wii was overlooked for all but the very biggest of 3rd party franchises.

So for publishers, the Wii didn't look like it had a particularly strong market for some traditional genres, and the extra costs of porting down (virtually building a game from the ground up) meant it got few of the multiplats. In the markets it was shown to be strong in (mentioned in my previous post), 3rd parties put games on the console.

It'll be interesting to see how much core support Wii U will get with its modern architecture and with most Engine makers boasting about the scalability of their game engine. Theoretically, we should see far more multiplats appear.

@bolded Your argument here and mine in the OP both come to the same conclusion. My point in the OP are that nintendo gamers BS radar tend to be a little more fine tuned than ps360 gamers the fact both games were reviewed badly and there is huge difference in sales only backs my claims.

For the rest I can mostly agree with you about devs having to build a game from the ground up for the wii.