Third Party Devs have made up their minds about the Wii.

[Procrastinato]

The_vagabond7 said:

NJ5 said:

Procrastinato said:

The "because of HD graphics" is pretty vague statement. Gears 2 cost $10M to develop. Lots of people claim it has some of the X360's best graphics.

Almost every Wii game in existance probably derived from a pre-existing GameCube engine, since the architectures are next to identical, outside of clock -- so how did Gears 2 get so cheap, when its not HD?

Which HD games were on their first HD engine architecture iteration, when you choose to quote their costs?

Gears is the exception... Engine costs = zero (it was already developed and no licensing involved), and it was partly outsourced to Epic China.

 

See, now there is legitimate solution to the problems that third parties face. Develop your own engine that is flexible enough to be used in future games, avoid expensive liscensing fees, outsource work when possible. 3rd parties should be looking to people like Epic that can make a high quality, high tech game with lots of features for 10 million dollars. They are doing something right. Simply saying "well they should stop making onrails shooters for wii, and make a good wii game, they don't understand the market" is not a constructive critique of the situation.

That's exactly what 3rd parties have been doing all this time, with the X360 and PS3, and now they're ready.  They already had single-threaded engines with the Wii, from the GameCube era, and the revenue from a Wii game wasn't enough to justify even the lessened expense of reusing what they had.

Cooking up multithreaded engines was expensive... and now that expense is mostly reduced to engine maintenance and improvement.  HD games are getting cheaper, but Wii games aren't.  At least the Wii games were cheap to begin with.