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Gamerace on 24 November 2008
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RolStoppable said:
Gamerace said:

My point still stands.  Wii is an abatrous for Japanese 3rd party developers making games for the local market.   And yes, PS3/360 is just too damn expensive for too small a userbase.    As far as home consoles go, the only system worth making a game on for them is PS2 (and you can port to Wii for another 10% of sales).

For those developers DS or PSP is the absolute best way to go.   Wii is not a valid option, unless as you say, it's a sure seller anyways and even then it'd probably be more profittable to have made that same game on DS or PSP.

I would say that Japanese third parties have been even worse than Western third parties when it comes to Wii games and that's the main reason why they didn't see many games selling well. Tenchu 4 is definitely not an AAA game. Besides, there were hardly any games released that you could have expected to perform much better than they actually did.

Nintendo holds about 80 % of the Japanese Wii software market and third parties have to blame themselves. Nintendo held about 80 % of the Japanese DS software market a couple of years ago, nowadays it's around or below 50 %. Take a guess of what happened in the mean time that led to third parties taking a bigger share of the DS software market while total DS software sales increased?

In my opinion it's very probable that third parties can have the same success on the Wii as they are having on the DS, but the first step for them is to improve the quality of the Wii games they are releasing.

I dunno - DS got a rerelease of every FF and DQ game ever made?  I'm not disagreeing with the %'s.  And we agree DS is a great channel for Japanese developers.  It's cheap to make games for and has a massive audience.   But really, how many of those games are quality?    I don't know.  We don't see 90% of them.  I doubt very much you know either.  Y-Koron would probably be able to answer that.    But quanity is there for sure.

But Wii (and the HD consoles too) have a long way to go before they'll be proven to be worth the investment.    Home consoles in general may simply never be worth the investment for a Japanese centric AAA game anymore.