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

[theRepublic]

mibuokami said:

What does the auto industry have to do with this? There's even a disclaimer at the end of the post stating A does not always equal B.

Is there a chance that the laymen is right? Certainly! But that is certainly not always the case! Generally speaking, when the laymen gets it right in contrary to the industry, its a monumental fuckup and everyone hears about it. When its the other way around, its just people doing there job and no one hears about it.

Are we really going to rehash what has already been said in this thread?  Fine, try not to ignore it this time.

We see in financial reports that many many developers and publishers are putting up a lot of red ink.  They are losing money.

We know that the industry put up record revenues in 2008.  Therefore, the only way they could be losing money is if they are also putting up record costs.

Do you think healthy businesses lose money when bringing in record revenues?  You still think these people know what they are doing?

We also know the reason for the record costs.  It is the extra level of detail that is needed in the art assets for games in HD to look as amazing as they do.  We know it makes games 2 to 4 times as expensive as their SD counterparts.

For games like Halo, Final Fantasy, and Call of Duty, the extra expense doesn't matter much, since those games are going to profit anyway.  For just about everything else however, these companies have completely failed to hold budgets in line with sales expectations.

Games that do not have multi-million sales expectations, should not have the big budgets to have highly detailed graphics.  Why management refuses to hold budgets in check I'm not sure.  I have a feeling they are afraid to release games with SD level budgets on the 360 and PS3 because they think those games will just get blown away by the big hitters with bigger budgets.  I think that this would happen.

So what is the solution if you can't just hold back budgets?  Release just a few big budget sure things?  We are seeing a lot of that.  Unfortunately, that also increases risk, and is why we have seen some studios close their doors after just one flop.

So what is left?  What to do with those games that should have smaller budgets...