| NJ5 said: You're mixing things up for the sake of criticizing other people. What Valve said (correct if I'm wrong, but this is what I remember) was that they are not interested in PS3 development. What iD is saying is much more general, aimed at all third parties. I don't think anyone here is really surprised that iD wouldn't care about the Wii.
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Not to play devil's advocate, but if you actually read the entire interview, that's not what he says. Big quotation follows (bold is mine):
"Now, maybe it's just that we don't know how to exploit it, and Nintendo does because they made the Wii, and they're really that good. And I'm not trying to take away from those guys at Nintendo. Their games are awesome--I'm a fan, too. But as a company that doesn't make Nintendo-type games, the Wii is less of a compelling platform for us to really sink a lot of resources into.
So somebody needs to demonstrate that there's going to be buyers out there that actually would show up and buy the games on the Wii. Even if we make an awesome game, there's still a question as to whether we're going to justify our investment. And also, I mean, if you look at the market, the type of games we traditionally make, those games are selling record numbers on non-Wii platforms. But despite the success of the Wii, and the fact that it's the largest-selling console out there, games like we make are still doing bigger numbers than they've ever done before.
So that doesn't give us a lot of cause to be worried about the Wii. We celebrate it, we love the Wii, but it's not for the type of games we make. I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that almost every company doesn't try to be all things to all people. Nintendo isn't trying to be all things to all people either. They have a great console with the Wii, they make great games. But they're really not trying to push the graphics envelope. They're doing other things.
So I think sometimes you have to figure out where you're going to make your bets and then go for it, as opposed to trying to do everything at once. Because the concern would be for us, especially as an independent developer, is that we place too many bets and our attention is spread out all over the place. We're making a focused, measured bet that says, "We really are confident that this is going to pay off." And that's what we've done with Rage. John's made technology that is cross-platform, we've made a game that we feel like we can deliver on console controllers just as easily as on keyboard and mouse. That's what we're going for."
In particular I think that the last paragraph validates what I said before about developers not seeing the Wii market as a financial safe haven as some of you think, and simply choosing which risks to take because of what they want to do or what they feel they are good at doing.
