Is the Wii bubble about to burst?

[famousringo]

jjseth said:
There is no doubt that the first party games are a major strength to Nintendo and they will do well. Of course they will sell systems. But what happens when "Joe" who has a Wii keeps hearing about this great game that is made by a 3rd party dev and is only on one or both of the other consoles with no plans to make it for the Wii since their first Wii game (which was for example a multi platform game) bombed while the other two consoles got solid sales?

It's just a different way to look at the situation and for the wii to truly dominate this gen (Which they have a great chance to do so with their record setting sales) they will need strong 3rd party support to turn even more gamers to their console. If either the Xbox or PS3 gets extremely great 3rd party games that the Wii doesn't go, it could change what people will buy for consoles in the years to come.

Any developer who's comparing sales on a multiplatform release and drawing conclusions on what platform they should focus on from that comparison is going to have a distorted view of the marketplace.

A multiplatform release makes compromises in design to accomodate the multiple platforms. One of those compromises will be controls, which will tend to gravitate to the lowest common denominator. They'll tend to use the same old analog thumbstick controls for all platforms. The Wii release gets a couple of tacked on gesture commands and a drop in graphical presentation to accommodate its weaker hardware. The result is a game that plays basically the same on all platforms, but looks better on anything but Wii.

Basically, I'm describing Madden.

The problem is that these multiplatform releases tend to fail to acknowledge and take advantage of Wii controls from the very start. The Wii is a departure in the gaming philosophy from other consoles, and few multiplatform games can deal with it.

If they want to know how well their games will do on Wii, they have to design the game with Wii in mind from an early stage, not just port it over and give it a graphics downgrade.

Pro Evo 2008 is an example of a multiplatform release which is respecting the differences of the Wii:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/26619.html