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Qays on 26 September 2010
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billsalias said:
Qays said:

But why aren't third party games on the Wii good enough? They're plenty good on other consoles.


This is the question. For me the weakness in third party titles has been the controls. They often seem to have designed the game, and more importantly the interactions, the same way they always have then tried to map the game to the wiimote. For the most part I find the wiimote inferior to a tradition controller for traditional games, as you would expect, so you really cannot win doing this. No matter how much time you spend trying to make the controls work they will always be poor because you designed the game with that traditional controller in mind.

This has caused a cycle. Third parties try releasing a game on the Wii to see how it goes, they use the same designers, developers and process they use building their PS/Xbox games. Because they either did not try to adjust their thinking or simply failed because it was their first attempt and it not trivial the game is not great. The sales reflect the quality of the game, because as the OP says core gamers look at reviews and play demos before they buy. The developer is not inspired by these sales to invest in focusing enough attention on the Wii to get the experience required to doa  good job so the cycle repeats.

This same problem has occured with each new generation to some extent, especiall when new controls are introduced (analog sticks, triggers, etc) but the developers push through it. I think the two reasons this generation is different is because for the first time you can do well without supporting the first place console and the second and third place consoles are comparable but very different from the leader. This means developers have to chose between two equals sized markets (HD vs Wii) where one (Wii) requires a lot of learning and new risks with uncertain rewards and the other (HD) is simply a bigger version of what you have done for years.

Executive summary: 3rd parties underperform on the Wii because they are not trying hard enough and they are not trying hard enough because they are afraid of the risk and the change.

I think this is a valuable analysis. But what about a game like MH3? It didn't try to implement any waggly nonsense and by all accounts it was a very good game. But its sales were very bad by the standards of the series and, indeed, pretty bad by the standards of big-name third-party games on the HD twins. And the "Nintendo outcompeted it" explanation doesn't hold water here, for obvious reasons, unless the suggestion is that a several-years-old Zelda game has permanently stifled all desire for action RPGs on the Wii.

We might be able to blame the poor performance of a lot of Wii third-party core games on the fact that they weren't all that good, but even good games seem to underperform.