HappySqurriel on 25 March 2007
Shane said:
The only positive I've heard about the Wii's software architecture is from Majesco, who says it fits their budget games strategy perfectly. So in addition to Boogie, we can look forward to more Cooking Mama Cookoff. Square and Take Two aren't going to dumb down their games to suit Nintendo's needs. Granted, anyone using UE3 can probably make games cheaper on PS3/360 than they can on Wii.
I'd take Sony's first/second party over Nintendo's in terms of sales. They need to find a way to replace the hit they took when Rare left, which didn't happen during the Cube's lifetime.
Congratulations ... you just won the "I don't understand, but will make claims anyways" award ...
After Majesco made Psychonauts (an expensive, critically acclaimed XBox game) and it sold poorly, and lost them a lot of money; after this they decided to focus on reducing development costs, producing simpler games, so that they could turn a profit. They never said that the Wii was about simple games, the implication was that the Wii was the only new platform not pushing developers towards $20 Million budgets. Square and Take Two have embraced the Nintendo DS so I wouldn't see why they wouldn't embrace the Wii.
Also, the Unreal engine doesn't make games "Magically" cheaper (and the Wii has the Unreal 2 engine anyways) what it does provide is a consistent high performance game engine which prevents re-work by your art team; there are savings in development but on your 40 to 80 person development team it only saves the work of (about) 4 to 8 people. Most of the expense in producing a PS3/XBox 360 game is in artists producing and animating the game assets; the Unreal engine doesn't have a "Magic" create soldier button which produces a unique soldier that is fully animated.
Edit: As for the Rare comment, how many Rare games were produced for the XBox in the 3 years they were owned by Microsoft? Ever wonder why Nintendo (after being approached by the Stamper Bros.) refused to buy Rare? Nintendo didn't buy Rare because they were approaching 4 year development cycles and the quality of their game was dropping ...
