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jarrod on 27 March 2010
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Mr Khan said:
jarrod said:

I think the problem with 3rd party games on Wii is really two fold.  

(1) AAA games from AAA developers for the most part aren't going to the system, and never have been.  Now we do have a few high profile counter examples (MH3, DQX), but we've never really had a situation like this, where the overwhelming market leader doesn't get the overwhelming market support.  What Wii seems to to attract is largely B-tier brands, spinoffs, shovelware and niche games, the games are generally badly or unpromoted and budgets are generally lower than even last gen on PS2/Xbox/GC.  It's bizarre, and even stuff like viable PSP ports that would likely do better  on Wii (Soulcalibur BD, Kingdom Hearts BBS, etc) aren't materializing.  It's like the industry wants Wii to fail, like publishers are actually fighting the will of the marketplace, and I'm honestly at a bit of a loss to explain it. 

(2) Robust 3rd party support didn't come fast enough, and as such didn't build markets to support core oriented games as should be expected by the overwhelming market leader.  I think Samurai Warriors 3 makes a great example of this... the game sold over 250k in Japan, which evidently didn't hit Koei's expectations for such a high profile release, but the real issue here was that they'd already built that Musou audience on PSP/PS3, and this was Wii's first legitimate Musou game coming a full 3 years after launch.  By comparison PSP got it's first Musou at launch (and it also sold around 250k), PS3 got it's first Musou less than six month after launch (sold 300k and carried the popular Gundam license) and even 360 got it's first Musou less than a year after launch (it bombed but well... it's 360 in Japan).  The problem here wasn't that Koei bothered with Musou on Wii, the problem was that they did it 2-3 years late... and really this story is emblematic of 3rd party Wii games.  You look at the first year and we saw quite a few notable 3rd party success stories (Red Steel, COD3, RE4, REUC, DQ Swords, Sonic SR, etc), but that wasn't really followed up on or supported fast, frequently or just well enough.  I think to some degree that market got tired of waiting and moved on.  And honestly, this problem may be more of a "too late" situation, the only question in my mind is if 3rd parties will fall asleep at the wheel and make the same mistake next generation...

It's an issue of investment, too. 3rd parties bet the farm on HD development, pouring millions into making engines for these games well before anyone was aware how this generation would actually turn out, and they're trying to stick with what they have. It would look really bad to investors if the 3rd parties came out and admitted that they could have made similar amounts of money without having to pour so much into cultivating new development assets.

 

That also explains the "multiplat everything" strategy that you see. 3rd parties chose to play in the space that ended up being the smaller space, where they simple couldn't survive unless they spread it out as far as possible across that space, leading to the concept of the "HD Twins" with "mirrored libraries." That's Wii's fault, since you see games that would have stayed exclusively Xbox (like BioShock) or exclusively Sony (like Devil May Cry) have to go across

 

I'll agree on the bafflement about them not making some no-brainer PSP-ports, especially of that Soul Calibur game. My guess is that has to do in part with PSP's strength in Japan, that for Japanese publishers it makes little sense to do PSP-to-Wii ports, since you're porting to a console with a smaller install base from their perspective. The more insulting thing is with the western third parties that make PSP ports (Army of Two 40th Day and Dante's Inferno come to mind here), when it would clearly have been to their advantage to make a Wii port instead, given that PSP can't move software to save its life in the West.

Well, I agree with 3rd parties betting it all on "HD", and that in part explains their slow turnaround.  My issue is more that there's been no actual market wide turnaround, they're just going ahead with "HD".  Even in previous generations where we had an unexpected market shift emerge (NES, PlayStation) you saw the industry eventually switch gears and move to correct for that shift... we haven't gotte that this generation, and it looks like we won't be getting it either. :/

The other end of this is DS, which has pretty much taken the bulk of Japanese support that I think Wii would've inherited.  Japan's weird... DS gets most of the mainstream stuff, PSP gets most of the otaku stuff, PS360 gets most of the stuff for overseas, Wii gets left with nothing.

As far as PSP games, I'd agree in some instances the JP market target makes sense (Gundam Vs Next, Valkyria 2, Absolute Hero, etc) but games like Soulcalibur or Kingdom Hearts are made more for an international audience, and do substantially more of their sales in the west (where PSP's basically a dead format for software).  Those sorts of games would more than double their worldwide sales with a Wii port.