| Sky Render said: The sad part of your maze analogy is that the path through the maze is laughably simple. The only reason none of the third parties have figured it out is because they keep trying to go down blind alleys on one side of the maze when the right path is very obviously on the other side of it. With a few exceptions, the distinguishing quality of Nintendo's greatest sellers on Wii is an immersive experience which cannot be replicated faithfully by button-pressing and analog stick movement alone. Unfortunately, after having spent years copycatting Nintendo's formulas by theme, the idea of copycatting the principles of interface just doesn't occur to third parties. |
Well maybe it's not the difficulty of the maze but the industry's culture , direction etc . For me to explain my point of view further i'll need to explain some things
Asset led marketing
A marketing strategy in which the attributes of the product (the asset) are used to market the product. Types of attributes can include the brand name and the image associated with the brand. An asset-led marketing strategy asks "How can we use the strengths of the business to satisfy consumer needs?" Business strengths can include core competencies, brand image, and global distribution. This strategy can be used concurrently with a market-led marketing strategy.
Market led marketing
A marketing strategy in which a company seeks to determine what products a consumer might want, and then moves the company to develop those products. It relies heavily on market research. A market-led marketing strategy asks, "What do consumers want? How can we satisfy this want?" This strategy can be used concurrently with an asset-led marketing strategy.
As you can see Nintendo is the perfect mixture of Asset led and Market led marketing , they've idenified what the consumer wants and have used their own strengths to supports their new stratergy which would have immensley damaged them if they had failed , the untraditional approach is highly risky but prooved very lucrative for Nintendo. Nintendo has smoothly transitioned into the tyrant we see today , on the face of it Nintendo hasn't changed much but I assure you they are different in many ways from what they were pre-Game Cube.
In comparison the average third party is asset led , they probably haven't looked at what the consumer wanted since gaming began they've loyaly followed the console makers in whatever direction they felt best and console makers have always taken a fixed and clearly defined path. But there comes Nintendo with the Wii in hand , 3rd parties were probably thinking "lol tf" and didn't take it too seriously at first maybe dedicating some spare resources to make an effort on the platform , the Wii didn't play of anyones strengths except Nintendo at the begining of this gen. The Wii continued in strength growing at an incredible pace ,eating up the XBOX 360's marketshare and the 3rd parties were forced to take notice. They would have responded with more serious efforts but too risky or too far from what they knew well , 80%-90% of these efforts would eventualy fail . Some third parties would continue to try (EA , Ubisoft etc) some would simply ignore the Wii claiming it didn't compliment their strengths (Epic , Rockstar partly etc) . I won't explain further because I've reached my main point already , making succesful games for the Wii requires alot more than simply copying how Nintendo does it and applying the principles to your own games , it requires restructuring of your existing business effectivley changing the orientation of your business or funding expansion to make the standard of game that apeals to this new demographic for developers it's either too expensive or too risky , most likely everyone in gaming is praying the Wii was just a faze in the bigger picture of gaming.
It's like the growth sports clothing received when it became fashionable to wear it outside of sports , Some businesses capitalised and used new materials , colours and styles ( Nike with Air Forces or Adidas with Adicolours) many other businesses failed to capitlise on the opportunity and decided to stay with what they knew , they were pushed to the side as a consequence ( Umbro comes to mind).
The traditional gaming market is big enough to support alot of developers , but with the cost of HD gaming and a highly lucractive new demographic busiensses are going to struggle to compete effectivley without their cash.
If you don't feel like reading the above i'll just sumarise it with 5 words , their orientation is all wrong.
