I figured out why 3rd parties hesitate to put their best teams on Wii games

[Pristine20]

RolStoppable said:

Pristine20 said:

Yes, you know why? because they probably won't put any "love" into making the games if they were forced to. I highly doubt a wii version of cod4 by IW would've been any good.

Thats fair that you believe it was all moneyhat. However, I find it strange that M$ would court Itagaki out of the blue. What did he do before ninja gaiden to make him deserving of this? Most of M$ obvious moneyhats this gen have been to accomplished devs and franchises.

You used the term "games fail to meet expectations on all systems". We finally have some common ground.

Thats fine that ninty's games sell a lot. It's the disparity I question. It ridiculously high. i've never seen that kind of phenomenon on any non-ninty console. like I said, the cop-out answer is always, "they're too good" but this is simply false. They may be good but not that much better than everyone else. maybe there's something ninty's games have even if I personally can't see it but that thing is also making people ignore other offerings which is leaving 3rd parties with no choice but to abandon their platform. Since you guys stick to ninty's games instead of actually trying others out, whats the point of a 3rd party effort? Call it "disruption" but with the wii, I feel like nintendo designed a platform only they could profit from and they're the only ones profiting from it.

That's fair enough. However,  clogging all "3rd parties" together and judging them as a whole is probably the same reason they'll never make any progeress with the wii. Some do make an effort but most clog them up with the "Imagine series" group anyway.

...because they designed the system and planned ahead? Magic doesn't exist. Notice how only sony's first/second party games don't have installs on ps3? It's a pretty similar concept.

Okay, we can drop the first point, because it doesn't lead anywhere.

Team Ninja made the Dead or Alive series, one of the most popular 3D fighting series at the time (and it still is).

Plenty of PC gamers say that Blizzard's and Valve's games are above everything else and Nintendo seems to be the equivalent when it comes to videogames. It's indeed possible to be much better than the rest.

I'll stick with my argument: The reason why third party games aren't hugely successful on the Wii is because these games are nearly always (vastly) inferior to the offerings from Nintendo and I have some interesting numbers to support that. The following chart shows software sales in Japan in the last decade (I would have done more if the data was available) and Nintendo's overall marketshare and their marketshare on their systems. Let's see how much truth there is to the myth "only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo systems":

Year Total software Nintendo TS on N systems N on N systems
1995 43,651,061 17.2 % 25,011,036 30.1 %
1996 48,748,137 24.4 % 22,759,956 52.3 %
1997 54,131,017 22.1 % 18,031,249 66.2 %
1998 52,783,679 21.5 % 15,997,446 71.0 %
1999 57,011,875 28.4 % 21,257,080 76.1 %
2000 43,656,066 28.0 % 17,009,408 71.8 %
2001 37,552,977 27.8 % 15,875,806 65.7 %
2002 39,426,395 27.5 % 15,676,613 69.0 %
2003 38,090,171 28.9 % 17,848,319 61.7 %
2004 37,083,160 44.5 % 19,152,460 86.1 %
2005 37,518,329 38.8 % 19,937,058 73.0 %
2006 68,801,404 46.7 % 42,871,494 75.0 %
2007 71,173,503 39.3 % 49,634,494 55.6 %
2008 45,374,201 37.1 % 29,127,487 57.8 %

I apologize for the messed up table, view this post for a better format and more details. 1995 marks the last time when third parties brought their A-game to Nintendo systems and the result of that was they held 70 % of the sofware market on Nintendo platforms. From there on out, you can clearly see the share rising for Nintendo, during the years they were abandoned by third parties. The peak is right where it became clear that the Gamecube would fail to sell a huge amount of consoles and the PSP was said to crush Nintendo's handheld dominance.

However, the DS and its insane software numbers (most of the growth in 2006 comes from DS software, in fact the DS in 2006 moved more software than all systems put together in 2005 and even moreso in 2006) brought third parties back to Nintendo. With increasing quality of their games came increasing success as can be seen by the dropping marketshare percentages of Nintendo. What we can conclude from that is that third party games can sell very well on Nintendo systems, but what has to come first is the quality from third parties. It's them who have to do the first step, not the customers by buying okay games until they finally "deserve" good games.

Installations and controller design are two very different things, so it's no surprise that it works wonders for Nintendo's games while Sony's first party games fail to light the charts on fire.

I didn't realize that DoA was such a blockbuster title. I'll concede that one.

I think by "videogames" you meant console games. I only know about one popular blizzard series which is an MMo that people subscribe to. I don't know how to compare that to console games. I'll agree that people seem to put valve on a pedestal as well. However, I don't think valve games have the breakaway sales that nintendo's games have. I'm not sure though so feel free to prove me wrong.

If you ask me, doesn't that chart prove my point? The fact that nintendo would have the vast majority of sales on every one of their platforms with only a handful of games? Think about it, nintendo doesn't release games every month therefore most of it's following either plays mario kart or another ninty title over and over or turns their wii off in anticipation of nintys next game since they won't buy from other companies. One of the reasons why it's hard to compare ninty's sales back then to more recent times (especially since the advent of the playstation) is the "viability" of the competition. When there's not much choice, 3rd parties are faced with different issues. Still, even from back then, we're still comparing a few ninty titles to tons of 3rd party games.  Perhaps since you think they'll all go bankrupt on HD consoles, their choice would be lost. We'll see. I still doubt they'll find any breakaway sales on wii though. probably a few $$$ profit here an there but I guess it's better than loss.

As for the DS, it's the same issue: a handful of titles as opposed to tons of titles. You're still grouping all 3rd party effort together showing the typical lack of appreciation thats the common perception among the nintendo-faithful.Like Like I said before, many of the 3rd party games that many agree are really good still don't have sales to match. The wii is not the goldmine you seem to think.

Yes they are. The point was just to prove that in-house studios are typically better at managing console specific perks.