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

[bigjon]

mrstickball said:
I think part of the issue is that the Wii has fragmented the gamer base into 2 categories: The HD base, and the Wii base.

Never before has there been such a fragmentation. Last generation, there was a pretty clear choice - You had the PS2 for any project, and it was near-assured to garner huge sales. And then there was the GC and Xbox as 2nd-tier products, multi-plat games, or moneyhatting situations that could give increased profitability.

Not so with the Wii/HD comparison. It's a catch 22: Spend tons of cash on a blockbuster HD game and it either does great, and makes tons of cash...Or does OK and hurts (ala Haze or Lair).

The other option is the Wii, which has seen horrible returns for some games..Works for casual games, but that also fragments your work force - Few games seem broad success between all 3 platforms. Madden would be a great example of this...Despite the huge install base of the Wii, Madden sales have been nothing short of abysmal given the install base.

Part of it is the developers fault, part of it is the HW manufacturers fault - and all of them. No one is without blame. Nintendo put out trashy hardware that fragmented the abilities of developers, while the HD manufacturers put out systems that exponentially increased costs past what may be viable for the average game.

please name a huge budget wii exclusive game that has failed on the Wii?

If they dev had comitted to the Wii there would not be the fragementation you see. But right now the tradtional gamer would walk into Walmart and be terrified at the Wii library (Nintendo games aside). Once the Wii has a well rounded library you will se more core gamers migrate. If the conduit is AAA quality, it could be one of those game, in Japan, it will be DQX.