Is Epic Mickey a lesson to third parties?

[psrock]

jarrod said:

psrock said:

So what, but why as developer am I going to spend so much when I can spend way less and still bring in money and sometimes more. No one doubts the Wii can sell, but it really doesn't need high budget titles though. 

A smart developer will make multiple low budget titles on the Wii which will bring tons of revenue and release one or two big budget on the HD systems. That's the way it is. 

I think the problem there is, we see most large publishers at this stage not even doing that. More, they're producing one or two low budget Wii titles (if they're doing Wii games at all anymore), and multiple blockbuster scale titles on the HD twins.  The amount of money being funneled at 360/PS3 versus the amount of profit gleaned from them (and versus the underutilized potential for profit on Wii) seems entirely out of whack.

But honestly, that's the way it's been the entire generation, so I don't think anyone really expects that to change now, and certainly not from Epic Mickey (who's surprising success is already being recast as an inevitable brand thing anyway). Companies allocated resources and pipelines before the current machines were even on shelves, and when they could have (and probably should have) changed that years ago they instead bet against continued Wii success for the most part.  It didn't exactly work out, so hopefully going forward into next generation 3rd parties can plan ahead to be a bit more nimble and actually follow the markeplace, wherever that leads them...

The thing is that's the way it's been. Epic Mickey is only a surprising success because at 72 in meta, usually these games don't sell 1.3 million in Dec and are not called AAA games.