DucksUnlimited said:
Mr Khan said:
DucksUnlimited said:
Mr Khan said:
It's either that, or they are morons across the board.
Pick whichever seems more likely, but no rationalization is otherwise possible.
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Or they know that they likely won't get a justifiable ROI seeing as how these companies actually know what these games cost to port to the system and can estimate based on previous performance what revenue will look like.
If you honestly think that is less likely than your conspiracy theory, I don't really know what to tell you. Do you think new employees at these companies are trained to hate Nintendo? Do employees have to demonstrate their hatred of Nintendo in order to get promoted? These companies span across the world in different countries with different leadership and business strategies. Some of them are relatively new, some have been around for decades. The idea of a global consensus among all new and old employees of every major publisher on the planet for several decades that damaging Nintendo is a higher priority for their company than making money is, well, ridiculous. Unless you have any sort of evidence for this being the reason for limited third party support, having this conversation with you is beyond pointless.
Surely one of these millions of employees/ex-employees must have leaked something over the past thirty years or so. That could be a good place to start.
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You're engaging in reducto ad absurdum too. It does not need to be a conspiracy at all levels, just a few bruised egos, a few misunderstandings, at choice levels that lead to the bad decisions being made (along with the analysts constantly running interference to keep the investors from complaining).
There have been few proven instances where a company gave actual good support to Nintendo consoles and got burned for the effort. ROI is all well and good to speak of, but where's the backing?
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It doesn't need to be a conspiracy at all levels? Then why has it persisted for decades? Why is it so widespread amongst almost every major publisher? This is, at the least, hundereds of people over many years that you are suggesting all have it out for some random Japanese company and want their downfall more than they want money. Trying to play it off like what you're saying isn't absurd is unnecessary. I think we both know just how silly it is.
For most companies/games we have no way of knowing whether the effort was profitable or not. Do you have examples of companies that directly stated that their game did very well on a Nintendo console from a financial perspective but then decided not to support them after that anyway? And more importantly, why would such a company, if it had this vendetta against Nintendo, attempt to support them in the first place?
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Investor pressure (specifically in Wii's case, anyway), wondering why they're dodging a potentially large revenue source.
The key plank to third party hypocrisy is the notion of "test games." They put out subpar games, or off-genre spinoffs, in order to "test" the markets on Nintendo consoles. If the tests fail, then it's proof that the game in question couldn't work on a Nintendo system (despite the fact that it isn't the same thing at all. EA and Capcom engaged this with action-horror franchises that suddenly became rail shooters). If the test succeeds, as it did in Capcom's case initially, it turns into more test games.
Riddle me this: why are they bothering to try with these half-assed efforts (no DLC, no this mode, no that mode), when they should know that it's going to hurt the game's sales? Either they had already written the platform off before they even tried (like EA and the self-sabotaged Mass Effect 3, Madden 13 and FIFA 13, or the DLC-less NFS), or they are conducting more "tests." Why would they put out a half-assed effort that they know is going to perform worse than other platforms, because they are *making* it the worse version, and then turn around and complain that Nintendo gamers don't buy games? If they are not putting the effort in because it's not worth the effort, then why bother trying at all in the first place?
The token efforts, then, are a decoy to investors to justify their strategies. As to why, exactly? Well, this industry is endemic with personal feuds and dev/publisher butthurt. Trip Hawkins threw a literal temper tantrum when investors forced EA to make games for the NES. EA helped kill the Dreamcast out of spite, the same spite they're applying to the Wii U. Hironobu Sakaguchi refuses to work on Sony platforms for some reason. Rockstar has ancient-history disputes with Nintendo, while there's also bad blood from way back found at iD.
View, still, the countless rants against Nintendo and the Wii that many prominent developers undertook during the Wii's heyday. There is plenty of bad blood out there, and all they need, then, is to get investors out of the way.
