By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Procrastinato on 20 November 2009
Edit Thread
LordTheNightKnight said:
Procrastinato said:

Reggie: "The conversation goes like this: 'We have a 22-million unit installed base. We have a very diverse audience… We have active gamers that hunger for this type of content. And why isn't it available?'"

Why is Reggie even asking this question, when he apparently knows the answer?

 

3rd party publishers don't want to pay the excessive expense of creating exclusives for a system which is wholly unlike its competition, and worse, make games for a hard-to-target demographic.  How many shooter fans does the Wii have?  How many assassin/platformer fans?  The numbers seem to suggest that, while the Wii, in general, has plenty of fans, they are, in fact, (to quote Reggie) "a very diverse audience".  In other words, they don't all like the same games, effectively limiting the number of buyers.

So having a narrow fanbase is what gets those games. You've just described the red ocean perfectly.

But even a diverse base is still going to have a lot of buyers, so ignoring those is still stupid.

The idea is that the narrow demographics are easily targetted, because they've already "raised their hand" as being in that demographic -- by buying a HD console.  Thus, they are much more easily targetted.  Since the HD marketshare is greater than 50%, and porting from HD-to-HD (since they are largely similar in specs) is cheap, the HDs make for a much more lucrative target platform... for "hardcore" games.  The devcost is more for HD games... but that's easily outweighed by the actual market size differences.

it just so happens that said "narrow fanbase" tends much more towards the HD consoles than the Wii.  Its just simple mathematics -- the crowd isn't there on the Wii, because much of the demographic just isn't interested those kinds of games.  This is pretty obvious from the last 3 years of attempts to bring "hardcore" gaming to the Wii.

There's nothing Reggie, or anyone else, can do to change this.  If Nintendo wanted "all the oceans", they should have made a console that appeals to the hardcore gaming crowd as much as the HDs (requiring a loss on HW, likely).  They chose the blue ocean only, and this is the drawback.

Oh well.  They are still rolling in cash.  I don't know how a console maker who has "fallen" to "only" having like 40% marketshare sold each week can really complain.