So the big wave of new games was a wash... What's going on?

[twesterm]

misterd said:

Legend11 said:

I remember reading postings from people saying that E3 would be the place where the Wii would start to see a huge wave of better games from third parties, better meaning they wouldn't be the same old PS2 ports, minigames, and budget titles that many third parties seem to be dumping on the Wii in order to turn over a quick buck on the system. So what happened?

So far the last few games I've seen announced for the system for 2008 have indeed been the same types of games (a PS2 multi-platform game and a budget title for instance). So why are games like Zack and Wiki and Boogie so few and far between and it seems that many third parties are still putting their top teams on games for the PC/360/PS3? Why are third parties instead putting spinoffs and jnr. titles on the Wii? Will it be another year before that wave finally starts to hit or is this what we can expect for the next few years?

 

I wasn't one of them.

E3 traditionally focuses on this year's titles, and most new games take more than a year to develop. By the time everyone really understood how much of a phenomenon Wii was becoming, there were only a handful of months to start developing titles. I imagine very few were even far past the planning stage, let alone in good enough shape to show off at E3. The only stuff they could have to present would be ports, quickie games and stuff that had been in development at the time of launch.

I doubt we will really see the fruits of the Wii's success until either late this year or, more likely, E3 2008.

 And I'll say this again: while I was looking for a job last January-March, I visited and talked to a very large amount of studios and just about every one of them had at least 1 Wii game in the works (some further along than others).  Some of those may never see the light of day or won't be anything spectacular, but a lot of them did look like a lot of fun.  The games are coming.