On The Verge of A Gaming Crash? Without Nintendo....

[bigjon]

We are seeing many western devs falling apart before our eyes, I believe it is due to two major factors.

1. They are wasteful, and manage their resources very poorly

2. They guessed wrong on the Wii.

As to the first point I have seen this discussed alot recently, but it just seems compared to Eastern devs, western Devs dont know how to run a tight ship. I really dont know what the source of the problem is, but I do believe it is related to my second point.

The second thing is the fact is that basically all of them have missed the boat on the Wii. Yea, some of them now are seeing the light namely EA and Take 2 (which have both stated recently they are shifting alot of focus to the Wii) but up until now they have been dumping tons on money onto the HD console, and they are now reaping the cost of that. With the news from Free Radical it even backs this up more... They banked on the PS3 (like many others), the PS3 has lived up to no ones expectations, and they lost terribly (not to mention they made a crappy game, but I feel partly the reason the game fell short is like of capital for them to made it good on a PS3 type budget, only a few devs can do that). Another glaring example of a western dev losing millions by missing the boat on the wii is... Rockband, even Activision lost alot of sales of GH3 by underestimating demand(it was sold out all cmas). Rockband Wii is outselling Rockband 2 on the HD consoles, but EA was so far behind the curve it took them so long to get rockband 1 out, they had to push back rockband 2, basically missing this cmas also. So basically, many western devs are losing money because they are making games only for 1/2 of the total userbase, and that half is the more expensive half to develop for.

So this is what I have been wondering, would we be on the verge of a gaming crash if not for the Wii and DS? It would not be like the 80's.... but It would see many developers go under, and the weakening of the gaming industry as a whole. ALL of the growth we are seeing is Wii and DS related, and many companies even now are able to operate because of highly profitbale casual type games they did put on the Wii(Carnival games, MySims, Lego Star Wars, etc). I think in the future they will put better game on the Wii and they will sell well, not as well as on the HD consoles, but more of them will sell (not just a select few) and they will be more profitable due to the MUCH lower dev cost and the familiarity with it (Similar to the Cube)

Well that is just what I think : ).