noname2200 said:
In a sense you're correct. Higher-budget games are often the AAA games that Nintendo is accusing third-parties of not bringing to the Wii. The fact that developers' A-teams are naturally assigned to the high-budget projects exacerbates this dilemma. The last sentence in your post, however, is wide of the mark. The fact that Wii games can be made with smaller budgets is a massive boon for the Wii. It permits developers to make quirkier games, without having to worry as much about getting bankrupted as a result. A game like Boom Blox or Little King's Story, for instance, is less likely to have been made for the HD consoles, because of those consoles' high price of entry. We also know that several developers have literally been priced out of HD development because of the prohibitive price tag. Hudson has been completely open about the fact that it can not and will not pay for the price of HD development. Marvelous and Majesco have hinted similarly. In fact, as far as I can tell the bulk of the small and mid-sized studios who are making console games are now focusing primarily on the Wii, likely for just that reason. So in that sense, it is indeed a massive boon to the Wii, and to gamers in general. |
You make it sound pretty great, in Wii-developer land. Like there is free lunch and everything. I hate to tell you that this just isn't the case. Money brings quality. As a matter of fact, the Wii is in the terrible position of having to "compete" with consoles that far outpower it, unlike any console from a previous generation, where the power differences were much lesser.
Squeezing performance out of a console costs darn near as much as throwing the kitchen sink in does. There are no "cheap" quality titles on the Wii, excepting those innovative titles that also appear (in other forms) on the HD consoles. Braid, for example. No More Heroes, for example. Pixeljunk Eden, for example. Super Stardust HD? Geometry Wars? Lost Winds? Those are great, great games. They were dirt cheap to make.
Are they high production value? No. Do they stand toe-to-toe with the high production value HD titles? No. Are they fun? You bet.
If you are saying that the Wii can have great games, for cheap, just like PSN and XBLA, you are absolutely correct. The Wii is no easier, and by that I mean cheaper, to make high production value games for, than the other consoles. The fact that the "Average wii game costs less to make" is a statement about the average Wii game... not the cost of development per unit quality on the Wii.
