Zucas said:
I'm not necessarily saying its as easy. But given current situations of having "easy" Wii games pay off for these games it becomes easy. Games like Carnival Games on Wii to pay off GTA IV made that game of little risk to make. Games like Game Party allow Midway to continue to make failed PS360 games haha. But even without that PS360 games sell pretty well right now given the current market. But down the line they want as Wii takes mainstream appeal away from them. And when that happens making those games dominant on PS360 won't seem like such a good idea when you can invest half the price for a AAA Wii game and get probably close to the same amount of sales. But now you've spent less and and made larger profits. But devs will only start seeing this as Wii userbases continues to grow and generate more mainstream appeal. As much as we hate Nintendo's "disappointing" Wii lineup for the rest of the year this really opens things up for 3rd parties. And when that mainstream crowd comes to buy this holiday season and goes through dominant 3rd party releases then you are going to see a change in 09. While PS360 will still be good, most people just fail to understand the power of having mainstream appeal. Especially in the holiday season. And I think this is the thing that is going to turn 3rd party's attentions away. Watch out for GH:WT on Wii this holiday season. Even with the higher price we should see something truly extroardinary. |
Perhaps you're right, especially about how the shift will hasten as time goes by. But from the financial reports I've seen, the HD consoles aren't really all that profitable for third parties right now either. In fact, even the Big Three are either losing money despite having record revenue (EA) are making a good share of their profits off the Wii and DS (Activision), or are being bankrolled primarily by the DS (Ubisoft). Sure, we're all wowed when Assassin's Creed or GTA IV light up the charts like they just did, but for every one of those games there are dozens of bombs and failures. Although I can hardly argue that GTA IV was a risk in any way: that and Metal Gear had "hit" written all over them.
But in light of how absurdly expensive those games were to produce, I have to think the companies' managements aren't as happy with the games as they'd like to be. Sure, the games are bringing in millions, but they cost tens of millions as well. When you have situations where a company's executive outright says "we need to sell a million on day one or we're screwed", or where a high-profile exclusive quietly goes multi-platform just to ensure that it has a shot of breaking even, you've got an industry with serious problems on its hands.
I remember before the current gen even launched, there were widespread concern about how absurdly high development costs on the HD consoles were going to be, but the general attitude was "what else can we do?!" Here's one example, if you're interested.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/dice-does-consolidation-kill-innovation
I know I'm coming off as a total fanboy right now, but I honestly dislike the HD consoles because of what they're doing to developers. If the Wii hadn't taken off, we'd see damn few console developers this generation, and that annoys me to no end, because without that multitude of voices innovation becomes less and less likely. But it's late, and maybe I'm just tired, so I'll end my ranting and raving here. Have a good night, dude, thanks for listening, and sorry for the lecture.
