I guess this fits better in this category since it primarily deals with games.
With the various 3rd party conferences occurring being thus far somewhat more weak than expected for Nintendo fans, the charge is brought up that it’s Nintendo’s own fault for making the Wii so weak. So did Nintendo screw up by making the Wii so much weaker? I think that far from being a mistake it was a brilliant business move for Nintendo. First and foremost Nintendo is in this for profit not to lose money pushing overly expensive overly powerful systems like MS and Sony. Video game consoles always lagged behind computers for a reason after all. It’s already been discussed why Nintendo chose not jump into the HD realm (small share of the market, slower than expected growth, and so forth). It was smart of them to not do so for many reasons, not least of which it allowed them to have the only mass market priced console and the only profitable one. This thread will primarily deal with 3rd party support so I’ll elaborate on that reason.
One of the N64 and Cube’s biggest problems was the lack of 3rd party support. There were 3rd party games of course but they were mostly ports. Had Nintendo raised the specs on the Wii its price would have gone up since Nintendo can’t bear the kind of losses Sony and MS can. Even so it would have still been the weakest system and even if a system is 1/3-1/2 as powerful it is very difficult to port games over. The PS2 saw that when Sega made Sonic Heroes on the Cube and Pandemic made Full Spectrum Warrior on the Xbox then ported them over to the PS2. The games looked terrible and still had frame rate issues. However, the Wii at its higher price would not have the market share of the PS2 and so couldn’t expect 3rd parties to make most games for it first with a few improvements added to the ports for more powerful systems.
The whole point of the Wii is the Wiimote, which means games need to be redesigned on the Wii to begin with. 3rd parties are like people and businesses everywhere else, they are inherently lazy. A more powerful Wii would mean they could just port the game over, tack on pathetic motion controls with the option of using the classic controller and call it a day. Making the Wii radically different forces 3rd parties to make games tailored to the Wiimote. That doesn’t necessarily mean minigames galore but it means much more thought needs to be put into how an FPS or RPG will control. Thought that may as well occur since they have to use a completely different engine anyways.
This does put 3rd parties in a difficult though not impossible position. As I see it they have 5 options.
1) They can continue doing what they are doing, spending most money on the PS360 and tossing crapware to the Wii.
2) They can design games on the PS360 and port them down to the Wii despite the higher cost.
3) They can design games for the much weaker PS2-esque mass market system first then redo the engine for the more powerful systems (leading to worse looking games on the PS360).
4) They can split their games evenly and focus on each system in particular (ie no ports or only a few PS3-360 ones).
5) They can focus on the Wii while largely ignoring the HD systems.
When analyzing which is best it has to be remembered, Nintendo cares about Nintendo’s profits and 3rd parties care about their own profits.
1 is not working for 3rd parties as EA has been the most recent company to discover, but while it may limit Wii system sales it ensures a higher proportion of game sales will be Nintendo so doesn’t matter to Nintendo.
2 would be expensive for 3rd parties ($20 million for the first game plus $5 million porting it) and would have a pretty bad profit margin as each system cannibalizes sales on the other, but again Nintendo wouldn’t care as that has little effect on its profit.
3 is cheaper than number 2 for 3rd parties ($5-10 million plus $10-15 million to port, $20 million overall) but would probably see similar total sales figures though more would be on the Wii which would marginally improve both of their profits at the expense of Sony and MS.
4 would be the most expensive overall for 3rd parties since each game would be bottom up for each system, hard to say how well it would do since only the Wii would regularly make profits for them and may tie up more gamer money in buying more systems than expected instead of games, but for Nintendo it wouldn’t have too big an impact on profits so wouldn’t much matter.
Lastly, 5 is probably best for all involved from a profit standpoint, both Ubisoft and THQ are doing very well primarily focusing on the Wii, but I understand that 3rd parties’ apparent graphics fetish and desire to keep any one company from dominating would augur against this one.
The key thing for Nintendo being its profits I don’t see how Nintendo’s decisions with the Wii have done anything but help it. At the very least gamers will get a Wii and either PS3 or 360. Since Nintendo makes a profit on every console even if a few different 3rd party games are enough for someone to buy a Wii, Nintendo profits. For MS and Sony every game someone doesn’t buy because they got a Wii is lost profit they desperately need to cover their huge per unit and development losses. The Wii has disrupted the marketplace and caused 3rd parties who refuse to get with the program profit problems but since when is that Nintendo’s primary concern? If the 3rd parties want to put graphics and keeping Nintendo from dominating the market (good luck with that) above profits they can keep going back to their shareholders with losses like EA, or with profits only due to one time gains like Bandai (DVD Gundam sales) and Activision (Guitar Hero II being #1 game) as they watch their stock price fall. That could be seen as good for Nintendo anyways, as Nintendo keeps raking in more profit than the rest of the industry combined they’ll soon be able to simply buy all these cheap wayward 3rd parties.
