Wii has half the amount of games coming as PS3/360

[mike_intellivision]

dtewi said:

psrock said:

nordlead said:

Considering how the generation started (no 3rd party support due to every analyst saying the Wii was going to epicly fail) I'm not shocked the trend has continued till now. Now, I had hoped and even said that 3rd party support would pick up, it hasn't (significantly).

Now, from a business perspective, I can't figure out why some of the larger multiplatform companies haven't put significant support into the Wii. Putting only crap games on the market leader is a waste of resources especially when just one 3rd party could move in with significant support and pick up all the sales that Nintendo doesn't take which would be like being the only legitimate publisher on the PS3 or X360.

The Iphone gets games the Wii doesn't, there's more to this than just decision made in 2005, it's been 4 years, you can't tell me it's because they thought the PS3 was going to be the leader, that worked in 2007.

It's because the Wii's casual market is easy to develop cheap shovelware for. 3rd parties won't put extra resoruces into making games for the Wii when putting out a game like Carnival Games rakes in massive amounts of dough.

The Wii is a victim of its own success in the casual market, and we're definitely not gonna see good 3rd party support for it, and most likely not for its successor.

I am tried of reading drivel that derides the "casual" market.

Wii owners like different/unique experiences. 

But how many games that (a) were not well-received and (b) were NOT first in their genre to market have done well on the Wii?

Some unusual games have done well. But only if they met this criteria (and were generally functional).

For example, everyone's favorite Carnival Games has sold 3.69M. But the imitators (Six Flags at 0.21M and Wonder World Amusement Park at 0.07M) generally tanked. Poorly received, me-too games  -- casual gamers know what not to buy.

Also, support from a big third-party does not necessarily mean success. Activision has 86 titles on the Wii. A total of 10 have sold over 1M but two dozen (24) have not sold 10K. (I own two from each category). If you look at the lower selling games, many are rueful mini-game collections or tired sequels to a game that sold well at the beginning.

In other words, what flummoxes third-parties  on the Wii is that the casual gamer actually seems to have a much more discerning pallet as they tend not to buy copy-cat games and often do not buy sequels.  This is not necessarily true on the other systems, so you can release the game two or three basic game types and know that an existing successful IP will continue to sell well.

Mike from Morgantown