High Definition Wii ?

[Lord N]

HappySqurriel said:

The combination of primarily Gamecube and PS2 ports on the Wii means that its graphics are already far below the PS3 or XBox 360s graphics and yet it outsells both systems combined ... In 18 months when the Wii really starts to hit its stride with a massive quanitity of high quality third party games it is suddenly going to seem gimicky and old compared to the PS3 and XBox 360 and stop selling?

What people never seem to understand is that third party support is linked directly to sales (not processing power); by the time the PS3 and XBox 360 hit a price where customers will consider their platform the Wii will have captured such a dominant marketshare that third parties will be focusing all their efforts on the Wii. The higher processing power and lack of Wiimote controlls will act as a negative for the PS3 and XBox 360 because developers will doubt the can produce worthwhile ports for a reasonable price (after all they would have to dramatically improve the graphics), reconsider the entire control scheme, all for a tiny portion of the market.

 

You act as though demand for traditional games with traditional control schemes just died at the moment the Wii was released, which couldn't be further from the truth. The Wii's marketshare will be largely composed of non-gamers who wouldn't have bought a PS3 or 360 anyway, and traditional gamers are buying it as a secondary console or as a stop-gap product until the 360 or PS3 siginificantly reduce in price.More third parties will support the Wii, but they'll probably just develop a bunch of party games, mini-games, and other titles that have the Wiimote forced in just for the hell of it. Traditional games that require stronger hardware and better online capabilities are always going to be bigger. Even Nintendo's upcoming first-party titles are far more looked forward to than anything any third-party has on the table, Wiimote or no Wiimote.The Wii isn't selling well because of software, anyway. It's selling well because it's cheap and trendy, so thrid-parties will make cheap games to make a quick buck because it's easy to develop for, but their big guns are going to be on the PS3 and 360.