| Porcupine_I said: am i the only one who thinks it is a good thing if the 3DS is not all powerful? all we would get would be quick and easy 3D enabled ports of current gen games, without any kind of innovation, because that would be the easiest and cheapest route to go for developers. |
We'll get them anyway and tons of shovelware as well.
Business-wise as I see it situation is as follows. Japanese devs gladly jumped on board since they have experience of developing for handhelds and have more close relationships with Nintendo overall since they (Nintendo) are dominant there (even more dominant than worldwide), while Nintendo more willingly approached japanese devs specifically (maybe they'll try harder with western devs afterwards) again due to more close relationships.
Western devs have missed handheld boat to some extent though they've tried with PSP thanks to Sony efforts, but as we've seen PSP undelivered. So they've jumped on smartphones (and DS) instead when technology and what's more important stable business models to monetize their efforts were implemented (btw I find this situation interesting, Japan have reputation of more mobile-centric nation than anyone, and still despite of all doom and gloom for handhelds from certain western journalists, Apple fanboys and gadgeteers, they have a sizeable market for handheld games that co-exits with mobile gaming... ok, back on topic).
Though I'm not saying that support that western devs (both indie and big ones) gave to smartphones is anything special and different from what they've been feeding us on DS/PSP, but they definately find AppStore-like marketplace a pleasing experience and produced a hell of a lot of games for it. Until now higher tier games were exceptions on mobiles and handhelds, but with more unification between home consoles/PCs and handhelds/mobiles thanks to middlewares like UE3 we may see more cost-efficient development of high tier games for high-end market that at the moment exist on X360 and PS3 en masse.
It's up to debate if the market needs this kind of games, this gen (as well as previous ones) has proofed that a) third parties not necessarily have a better understanding of mainstream consumer so appealing to third parties do not equal a good business strategy; b) console-like experience that I've just described proofed to be not sufficient to establish oneself at handheld market (PSP), home consoles just canniblize handheld games sales; c) do this industry really needs yet another one radical bump of costs now on handheld front? instead of more healthy wide range of budgets from lowest to highest (3DS will suffer if it leaves low-end to mobiles entirely and Nintendo won't experiment with what they call 'expanded audience' once again).
