| mike_intellivision said:
Do developers see this, think of who is buying the Wii, and take a "Ubisoft" approach -- "Let's make games for children, teen girls, and casuals and make lots of money. We'll put our harder-edged stuff on the HD consoles. If Wii owners want it, they will buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 -- and many already have them anyway." |
My guess for this part is that no traditional third-party game on the Wii has gone multi-platinum yet (although quite a few have done pretty darn well for themselves so far...). This boils down to one simple truth; most publishers are sheep. They don't have any original ideas and they're extremely hesitant to take big risks. When some bold spirit goes off and finds big money by taking a risk, the other publishers fall all over themselves in playing Follow The Leader. But they'll be damned if they'll be the company that dares to lose sight of the shore first.
To put this in a less rambling way, third-parties see that a few traditional games do extremely well on the HD consoles, and that the only traditional titles that perform on the same level on the Wii are Nintendo games (which never count, for some reason I still don't comprehend). This has hitherto led to a vicious cycle in which they refuse to put their best teams on the system, which means the games aren't as high-quality as they are on other systems, which means they don't sell as well, which means...well, you get the point.
And for some reason, they ignore the third-party games that do sell quite well. That, I can't explain.
I will say this, though: it seems like quite a few Japanese companies are breaking out of this mold. Sega's the biggest of these, but Japan as a whole is daring to tread the path blazed by the Little White Box That Could. For their sakes, I actually hope they take the time to grow the userbase with Bridge Games and the like before going all-in with the fully-traditional stuff, but I wish them the best of luck either way.
Why else would Namco-Bandai be hesitant to bring Fragile to North America.
Just a quick note: they're probably hesitating because they're unsure about the sales potential, and they're right to worry. It's a Japanese Action-RPG. I can't think of too many not made by Squeenix that have done fantastically in the West, and there's no reason to think the Wii will prove to be an exception to that rule. Add in the fact that Namco's own Vesperia has had only a lukewarm reception (despite being a pretty good game) and Namco's probably thinking twice about its Western strategy.
