Why third party core games fail(ed) on the Wii

[greenmedic88]

RolStoppable said:

greenmedic88 said:

Video games in general were almost exclusively a core experience about 3 generations back. There really wasn't an "expanded audience" to speak of.

I'd argue that it was the original Playstation that began the process of expanding the general audience. First console to sell over 100m units? The core video game market didn't expand that much over one generation it's pretty safe to say.

It's not that all those old 8 bit games are now "casual" games (many of those old 8 bit games are as hard core as ever in terms of hair pulling difficulty), they're simply viewed from a different perspective. Nostalgia for those who originally lived them when they were new, and maybe curiousity for those who didn't. They won't spend hours perfecting speed runs to post on YouTube, but they've probably played a lot of the old classics here and there.

Either way, it's still possible to have a game that appeals to both the expanded and core audiences. It's just a delicate balancing act that very few developers are able to do successfully aside from Nintendo.

The biggest problem with third party games on the Wii may simply just be an issue of publishers not wanting to use their A list development teams, or more specifically, spend AAA budgets on core games that the general Wii audience has shown time and time again that they just aren't interested in buying.

The core audience on the Wii (to include those who don't also own a PS3, or 360 or gaming PC) is almost definitely smaller than that on other platforms, so unless a developer can make a title with crossover appeal, they're not likely to see sales figures change dramatically in direct proportion to how much money, time and effort they spend.

Know the market for your product and choose appropriately where you want to sell it. The Halo franchise or GTA franchise simply wouldn't make the same numbers that they do on other platforms if they were "Wii exclusives."

The PlayStation wasn't so much expanding the general audience, it was more of a global expansion. The majority of its growth over the NES comes from selling to the whole of Europe as well as some other countries. If you can sell video games to kids and teenagers in America and the UK, it's not hard to do the same in mainland Europe, especially with the distribution network Sony already had in place due to their electronics.

You say that the Wii audience has shown time and time again that they aren't interested in buying AAA third party games, but that claim can't be backed up. For one, there hardly are any AAA third party games on the Wii and two, those that are have done well (Monster Hunter 3 and, if being generous, Red Steel was also AAA).

It's downright ridiculous to suggest that people aren't interested in AAA games when those games have never been made. You might as well say that the PS3 audience isn't as interested in Gran Turismo as it used to be in the previous two generations, because after all, the best selling GT on the PS3 hasn't even sold half as much as GT4.

Of course people are interested in them, regardless of platform. That's kind of a "duh and or Hola" comment. That's not the issue. If you can sell more copies of a franchise like Halo or GTA on the Xbox, there's not much financial sense in trying to get the same kind of sales figures on the Wii. It just won't happen.

If they do a port, they'll spend the appropriate amount of time and money relative to what they project sales to be. And that's not even going into the limitations of the Wii hardware itself. You can either redesign a game from the ground up (costly), or you end up with something like Chop 'til you Drop.

Part of your problem with this mythical "AAA" label is that if a game doesn't sell, the audience didn't like it regardless of what efforts a developer put into it or how much they spent, in proportion to how well the game sold, then by definition, it's not an "AAA" title. So the Wii doesn't get any (or next to no) third party "AAA" titles by that definition.

It's like you're suggesting if someone just spends enough and comes up with something brilliant and original that can only be done on the Wii, then they'll have an "AAA" title that sees appropriate sales that exceed projections. That's really what it sounds like. If it were that easy to catch lighting in a bottle, everyone would be doing it.

Don't think for a second that any third party developer wouldn't like to get a high profile title, regardless of platform, that nets millions.