| Smash_Brother said: I see where Legend is coming from, but in the grand scheme of things, as the Wii's userbase continues to skyrocket, it won't matter if games sell to only 2% of the Wii userbase, it'll still sell as much as the PS360 version would and, with the drastically lower costs of development, it'll be a better investment. I realize that the games are portable between the two (three if you count the PC), but you have to realize that most of these games aren't going to make their money back without breaking the million mark, and unless these are hyped games, the odds are that they won't make those numbers. Take the Orange Box, for example: it's a game that's as "hardcore" as they come, and yet it has only sold 423,966 on the 360 and another 62,000 on the PS3 (with its shoddy, rushjob port). It'll still do fine because the game's primary market is on the PC where it has no doubt sold the most copies, but it didn't even break a million between the two consoles and had it been developed with consoles in mind and wasn't a known franchise already (like many still are), it could have not made its money back. Namco has gone on record saying that, in order for a PS360 game to break even, the game needs to sell at LEAST a million copies. That sucks. Most games never achieve those kinds of lifetime sales, making the risk of creating a game for the PS360 very high, even if you DO port the hell out of it, the porting still costs money to do. As the Wii userbase continues to climb, the risk of developing a Wii game will drop. The Wii has the same potential to sell hardcore games, it's just that the majority of 3rd party Wii offerings have ranged from decent to total crap, hence why the games tend to sell poorly (and in some cases, still sell well, like Sonic Secret Rings which has 750k sold). The situation you're talking about isn't a permanent one. The lower development costs coupled with a higher install base will push more games toward the Wii (it already is). The money will do the talking here and the Wii will never become any LESS lucrative as time passes. |
In my opinion, Legend11's biggest mistake is that he assumes that because there are few announced high quality third party exclusive conventional games for the Wii that there will never be any high quality third party exclusive conventional games for the Wii; this is (of course) spurious reasoning and is akin to me claiming that I own a rock that keeps away terrorist attacks because I have never been attacked by a terrorist when I had this rock in my possession.
Realistically, you're going to see a ton of conventional games on the Wii as third parties begin to switch resources towards the Wii; right now developers are (probably) going to reallocate PSP and PS2 developers towards the Wii, and being that most development teams focus on certain genres or IPs it is likely that they will focus on the types of games they're good at. At the same time, Nintendo has opened a pandora's box with the Nintendo DS and developers have seen that a game (like Brain Training) can cost nothing in comparison to a conventional game and still sell tens of millions of copies (I believe Nintendo claimed the initial Brain Training took 9 developers 3 months to produce); this will result in countless low budget unconventional games being released for the Wii and the XBox 360 and PS3.
