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

[NJ5]

 

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.

Not every company has the expertise to cheaply and quickly enough develop an engine capable of high graphical standards. I agree that they could manage budgets better, but clearly it's not simple or easy even if Epic makes it look easy. Otherwise EA and the other mammoths would be outsourcing like hell.

As for your latter point, it's not mutually exclusive with the rest.

@NJ5 All of you think the whole industy is wrong ? HD development is a failure ? So what is going to happen with them ? Because I bet nothing will happen nothing special which could indicate such a huge failure. The industry is NOT domed.

Not the whole industry is wrong, but a large part of it is. The first rule of business is that you can't continually let your expenses grow faster than your revenue, the gaming business has largely been on the wrong side of this rule for years (even before this generation started). This was causing smaller publishers and developers to be assimilated into EA and other big companies, and now even the big companies are suffering.

We could go very deep, but that about sums up the biggest problem with the industry.