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

[bigjon]

mrstickball said:

bigjon said:

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.

Please name games that would be up for consideration :)

I mean, if you look at games like No More Heroes, Zak & Wiki, Nights: Journey Into Dreams, Opoona - they all did pretty bad compared to similar 'high budget X360 exclusives'.

And here's my problem: Go look at sales for games like The Force Unleashed, Madden, and Call of Duty - all big name Western games. They all did pretty crappy on the Wii while selling very good on the X360/PS3. CoD: WaW would be a MASSIVE example of this. World at War has sold over 4 million copies on X360/PS3 and under 250,000 on the Wii. Wii advocates say "b-b-ut it'll have legs!" - Even if it does, does that help in a situation to where the HD versions have sold 20 times more units than the Wii version? Don't you think that some hesitance from Western developers is justified given some of the multi-plat performances? I'm not saying everything is bad: the Wii does a great job of selling games that are targeted for the 'E for Everyone' crowd. But that's not the entire marketplace. Give me a few T and M rated million sellers on the Wii.

One of the failures, I see, in respect to the West is the slow adoption of potent middleware technologies for the PS3 and X360 that could help out with their budgets. I've been a big advocate of extensive middleware usage ever since games began to have high budgets this generation. Want an interesting note? Gears of War cost the same amount to Epic as Red Steel did to Ubisoft. Both were ~$10 million dollar games. Guess which one made more profit?

 

wow just wow... you compared NMH and Zack and Wiki to big budget HD games... LOL

Also, COD is a bad example. COD4 was not on the Wii, and most of the people who are buying WaW are getting it because they loved 4... I for example bought COD5 on the PS3 over the Wii. Why? Because I did not want to risk get the Wii version, I went the safe route. Again, the crappy developers have conditioned us to be scarred of Wii Ports. Also which brings to mind it is possible that MAYBE cod3 Wii lingering negative vibes has damaged the sales of CODWaW.

Either way, most of your argument you made to me are really out there. Also I have a hard time believing Red Steel cost as much as gears... I have not played either, but it just doesnt make sense...

Also, I know you dont like the Wii much... kinda released that when I saw your sig.... Did you really think the Wii would only be ar 35 mil by the end of this year... or was that just pipe dream