Codemasters CEO Rod Cousens speaks out about the Wii

[gawalls]

Chadius said:
Bodhesatva, you are correct, third party companies are pretty much afraid of the Wii. They expected it to fail, hate the change in game culture it presents, and Sony gave them a much bigger (console-wide) marketshare to swim in (ie Sony First Party <<<<<<< Nintendo First Party.)

There are a few situations that can result from this.

1) New 3rd party companies step up. Many 3rd party publishers have died (Acclaim) and others have stepped in to fill the void. If the "Old Guard" is willing to ignore the money on the table, the new kids will sweep in and take over.

2) No growth. Companies can ignore the Wii and make games for the other consoles. They might break even while Nintendo prints more money. Stockholders are going to eventually ask "why aren't you making games for the Wii?" And they'd better think up a good answer. Especially if the Wii's userbase greatly dominates the others.

Basically, I don't see how 3rd party companies will be able to ignore the Wii. Consumers don't care about who published the game. Most don't care about developers, either (see Guitar Hero.) All they care about is where the good games are. Nintendo will have many high-quality games with a huge userbase, and that is where game sales will go.

Totally agree Chadius - for every door that existing third parties see as closing third there's a new door opening, Wiiware's launch this year will give so many smaller setups a chance to approach the Wii, get a code base, game engine in place, test the waters, see the feedback and if it catches on then possibly release improved "polished versions" of their first attempts. On top of this there's probably also PC devs now looking at the Wii (I predict late 08, early 09 is gonna be big for point and click style games) and it's setup and thinking "fantastic - everyones played PS2 - Wii ports to death so lets port some old PC games over to the Wii and test the waters with console gaming. By the time these Codemasters etc do a U turn then they'll be a whole new playing field and they'll get left behind.