HappySqurriel on 02 February 2009
| mrstickball said: Celine - Microsoft and Sony do have very viable ways of getting Indie & smaller studios in the mix, and allow them to be profitable. They're called 'Downloadable titles'. Kind of like Braid, which cost a whopping $300,000 to make and has sold over $3 million in revenue. The ways to publish niche/indie titles still exists, even on HD consoles. Given how rampant the Castle Crashers crowd has been (#1 DL game of 2008. 500,000+ copies sold), the titles aren't selling too poorly, either. |
WiiWare, PSN and XBox Live Arcade are excellent platforms for tiny developers but (on their own) are not enough to really produce a healthy industry ...
If we look at game development currently and compare it to the size of development teams from generations past we'd have:
- WiiWare, PSN and XBox Live Arcade are similar to Atari, NES and SNES
- Nintendo DS and PSP are similar to the SNES and N64
- Wii is similar to the PS2, XBox and Gamecube
- The PS3 and XBox 360 are a whole new scale of project
Realistically, no developer can make the jump from developing a game for the Nintendo DS/PSP to making a game for the PS3 or XBox 360 ... What this means is there is a massive hole in the industry that the Wii has filled.
