Wii following in DS´ footsteps when it comes to 3rd parties?

[noname2200]

OLDSKOOL said:

On shelves here in Australia I can't keep up with all the third party releases! They are mostly crap and I don't want to "keep up" with them but this will only continue. The problem is that higher production values havent always meant higher sales on Wii for 3rd parties and most companies are still happy releasing cheap crap that even when they fail they lose next to nothing!

The market leader can't be ignored and Nintendo have easily more third party support than on Gamecube but if this leads to AAA quality 3rd party titles that become millon silling monsters remain to be seen!

If Zack and Wiki, No more Heroes, Boom Blox, Manhunt 2 etc sold millions of copies like Nintendo 1st party titles, this issue would not be even debated!

Summing up my thinking is: Yes that while under different circumstances, the Wii will see more support and better returns for third parties like the DS! Now where is umbrella Chronicles 2?

I think I agree with most of your post. We will continue to see shovelware on the Wii, simply because development costs for the system are manageable, something that can't be said for the HD systems. And wading through those games to find the many gems is a bit of a pain. The place where I think we diverge is about third party AAA games on the system. While they're imminent (we already have release dates for some) we haven't seen too many of them so far, making the Wii's performance difficult to gauge.

The major games it has hosted have all proven to be quite lucrative, though: Zak and Wiki, No More Heroes, and Boom Blox are three games whose publisher's have gone on record as being quite happy with their sales. Manhunt 2 bombed, it is true, but the game sucked, period. The fact that the Wii version outsold the PS2 version by a large margin tells us it wasn't the system's fault that the game didn't sell: it was the game's.

In any case, the next few months will prove to be quite interesting indeed.