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Legend11 on 28 December 2007
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Smash_Brother said:

Suggesting that the Wii, if it continues to dominate in sales, will NOT also dominate in 3rd party support is the argumentative equivalent of plugging your ears and screaming "NAAAH NAAHH NAAHH! CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!"

I'm not trying to be mean. I'm trying to point out the economic fallacy in your logic. It outsold the 360 in less than half the time and burned the PS3 right out of the gate. I realize that zealous fanbots will pluck any excuse they can from their rear ends in an attempt to reassure themselves in their decision to purchase a PS3/60, but really, it's starting to become embarrassing.


There's something that your're missing though...  The PC, 360, and PS3 all have gamers that have relatively similar tastes in games.  I'm not saying that every PC game would be a hit on console or vice-versa but that there is definitely a lot in common between them.  The Wii on the other hand has a much more diverse audience in which the hardcore are not the majority.  Add into that the fact that the Wii has significantly less power than the other two consoles and a unique controller and it adds even more differences between them. 

So why is all that important?  Well because third parties are making a lot of multiplatform games and they can pretty much treat the PC/360/PS3 audiences as the same and development as pretty similar between them (especially with popular engines like Unreal Engine 3).  Sure there are some differences like some 360s not having a harddrive but that pales in comparison to the Wii's differences (88 megs of ram, motion controller, etc).  So basically that adds to the decisions that third parties have to make when deciding what platforms to put games on and what they want the game to achieve.

Now I'm sure someone will mention the development budget on the Wii being lower but that isn't the whole picture.  Multiplatform games can spread costs among the different versions (level designers, artists, etc).  Also because of the very nature of the PC/360/PS3 audiences it's likely easier to know what games are almost a sure thing with them.  Not only that but some successful third party multiplatform PC/360/PS3 games are hitting 3-5+ million right now.  That's several million copies of pure profit once the initial cost is paid off.  You can bet that third parties planning AAA games take that into consideration.