Developers NEED the Wii and DS

[Bodhesatva]

HappySqurriel said:

davygee said:

The problem seems to be the game budgets. It seems that games for the PS3 and 360 tend to have huge budgets to help development etc....but the number of bought units doesn't equate to development costs.

IMHO, the DS is the most profitable platform for any game developer at the moment. Development costs are low and userbase is huge. The only problem with developers making games for the Wii and DS is that they are technically restricted because of the hardware, so some developers want to push to be making the bigger more graphically enhanced and more technically superior games...but they are not getting good enough sales.

I think we'll see more multi-platform games being released similar to Spiderman 3 etc.

It is the same problem you see with movies ... Every studio seems to want to push the "Big Budget Blockbuster" of "Epic movie" but these movies cost a lot of money, very few producers/directors can handle the scope of the project (so a lot of projects turn out poorly), there is a limited number of consumers who are interested in these titles, and (because there are so many of these movies) they lose the "special" value.

While I largely agree, there's actually an important difference here -- going to a Blockbuster action movie (say, the new Spider Man movie) doesn't cost more than going to see, say, The Departed (awesome movie, low budget). However, if you want to play the flashy new blockbuster games, you have to buy a 400-600 dollar system instead of a 130-250 dollar one. That's important to note: imagine if tickets for Spider Man 3 really did cost twice or thrice those for movies with less special effects.