Being that it has been more than 5 years since the Xbox 360 launched, new handhelds are being released, and people are talking more and more about the successor to the Wii, I have been thinking a lot about the future of the gaming industry over the last little while. In order to do this I needed to understand what happened in this generation; and (in my opinion) the most important question is “Why did third party publishers never adapt to the success of the Wii?”
From what I have seen, explanations of this fall into two separate but equally incorrect categories. First off, there is the claim that developers are “Artists” and they could never compromise their vision by producing it for a system with lesser processing power; the reason this fall apart is that, as anyone who has worked for a videogame developer can tell you, outside of a few elite studios (and independent developers) the publisher dictates what is produced and their interest in “Artistic vision” is similar to a pimp’s interest in romance. The second explanation is that publishers/developers hate Nintendo and want to see them fail. The reason this falls apart is that publishers/developers did adapt to the success of the Nintendo DS.
The best explanation I have is that publishers accepted that they were going to face higher development costs in this generation long before the Nintendo DS was released, and came to the conclusion that they were going to manage this risk by releasing games to as many platforms as they could. This is why most third party games have been released to the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 even though (at times) they could seem like a very odd fit for the platform. Publishers didn’t support the Wii because it went against their multi-platform approach; because you couldn’t make a good cross-platform game with the Wii without making two separate games that took advantage of the graphical and user interface differences between the systems.
The reason I believe this is important is that I suspect that third party publishers are going to take this approach a step further in the next generation; and the reason many of them are talking about delaying the beginning of the next generation is that they’re waiting for smartphones, tablet-PCs, and net-books to become powerful enough that they can release a game on those devices at the same time as they’re releasing a game to a home console. I could be wrong but I actually think that an approach like this would be very negative for the industry on the whole. When you’re making a game for multiple systems at the same time, the design of that game tends to be determined by the lowest common denominator of the systems; and games stop being designed to be the best possible experience for a platform, and end up being the most acceptable experience for all platforms. When you’re dealing with systems that are a lot alike this isn’t much of a problem, but the less similar platforms become the more a game would suffer on one (or more) platforms.
