By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
jarrod on 30 November 2009
Edit Thread
Procrastinato said:
mike_intellivision said:
Procrastinato said:
jarrod said:

Real solution: Release AAA games, not budget spinoffs and niche new IPs. It worked for Monster Hunter.

 

The "problem" with 3rd party Wii "efforts" is 100% content, 0% pricepoint.  If they did it on PS2, they should be doing it on Wii.

Games don't profit at $50/unit to a demographic (which is not the overall ownership) base smaller than what the PS360 have.  That's the problem.  The budget for those games has to be small to compensate.  Budget is the most reliable indicator of eventual game quality -- obviously there are many exceptions, but there are no other factors, other than developer rep (and reputable devs usually demand a high budget..), that are a good estimator of game quality.

If you research your history of development, one bigh reason that MH3 was moved from the PS3 to the Wii because of the differential in development costs.

In other words, your assumption that development on the Wii is as costly as development on the PS3 and Xbox 360 is generally not true. There have been many threads about this. But the difference is usually put at between 25% and 33% -- much more than the 17% difference in prices points.

 

Mike from Morgantown

 

 

MH3 is a minor upgrade of the MH2 engine from the PS2.  Moving MH2 to the Wii, and enhancing it, was easier than greatly enhancing the engine and moving to the PS3/360.  It has nothing to do with the Wii, per se, and everything to do with code re-use from the last generation.

Your bolded comment above, is manufactured.  I have never said that its not true.  I have always said that it *is* true, and that's why Wii games are low quality.  Pretty big difference.

Not taking the sum total picture in account is your argument's major flaw.  Not only is the per-unit price a problem, but the untargettable demographics are a serious, serious issue.  You can't deny that games like CoD:WaW, or The Conduit, are good games... yet they didn't hit anywhere near the HD numbers for those titles, or like titles.

I'm suggesting that the demographic issue is not fixable.  The price point one, is.

lol, no.  MH3 was built ground up around Wii spec, there's literally no shared code with MH2.  And it looks dramatically better too, as one should would expect from a machine with double the clockspeeds, triple the memory and a superior GPU.  And it's not just looks, monster AI has been dramatically overhauled as well.  MH3 is a shining example of what developer *should* be doing with Wii, it's a game that PS2 literally couldn't handle unless it was significantly scaled down.

Any current demographic issues are directly a result of 3rd party efforts.  I agree there's some problems now, but that's entirely due to 3rd parties not cultivating those audiences in the first place.  Just look at the difference with how Activision's handled Guitar Hero versus Call of Duty on Wii, and how that's shaped the target base for each IP on the console.  This isn't something a $10 price increase would fix, if anything it'd likely make issues worse (as I seriously doubt a $10 would bring general Wii budgets in line with even AAA PS2 games, it'd still be getting mainly shovelware).