Wii owners continue to fund Ubisoft's HD games

[Doobie_wop]

RolStoppable said:

Doobie_wop said:
Nintendo shouldn't get what they don't deserve, they're probably the worse third party publisher to work with out of the big three and yet people still can't grasp why third party support on the Wii can't match the output of games on the PS3/360.

List:
- The HD consoles sell their games for $60 each at launch, that is significantly more than the $50 or lower they'd have to launch with on the Wii.

- The games people want ported from the HD consoles (Assassins Creed 2) cannot be easily ported to the Wii without major drawbacks. The resolution would make it downright ugly, the number of NPCs on screen would be significantly less, the draw distance would be much shorter and fairly foggy, the AI of the NPCs would be less intelligent, the frame-rate might take a hit, the controller layout would have to be adjusted specifically to suit the Wii remote and that could get janky. People will see the port and criticise it, if you don't want a port then you basically want a whole new AAA game made exclusively for the Wii and then that'd be criticised when Ubisoft Montreal don't have the man power to shift 100 developers to a whole new project for a platform with a history of not selling similar types of games.

- Ubisoft can't make money after the initial purchase, why should they go through the extra effort of porting or developing a new game when one of their largest sources of revenue can't be accessed because Nintendo were too cheap to put a hard drive into the Wii. DLC is important to them, it was also important for a lot of big third party games this generation.

- Nintendo aren't making any sort of effort in trying to persuade these publishers, what can they give? Sony and Microsoft are all about attracting third party publishers to their platform, it could be by funding their games, allowing Steam on the platform, putting them in the spotlight for Summer of Arcade, buying exclusive content, buying exclusive launch windows and just making their platforms as appealing as possible to develop and release games on. Nintendo doesn't make a quarter of the effort and when they do try it's always half hearted.

There are so many reasons why third party publishers choose to avoid the Wii and most of it is Nintendo's fault, they made the choice early on about what their system would be and how they'd market it and they've stuck to that stance for the last five years. Just Dance sells very well on the Wii, Ubisoft have made a legitimate effort to put out good games on the console and none of them have worked out, they're just sticking to what works.

You wanted a reply from me, so you'll get it.

1) Game prices for the HD consoles were raised to $60 to make up for the increasing development costs of games. AAA games on the 360 and PS3 on average cost two to four times more to make than AAA games last generation. Since the Wii is closer to last gen hardware than those of the 360 and PS3 it's obviously cheaper to develop for. Let's say a AAA game sells one million copies, on the Wii it goes for $50 a piece, on an HD console for $60. One million times $10 equals $10 million, that's the difference in revenue between the Wii and the HD game. But we know that AAA quality can be built on the Wii for $10 million while on the HD consoles the same kind of quality takes $20 million on an HD console. Take Naughty Dog for example, they made AAA games last gen and this gen, but the games they developed on the PS2 did cost more in the ball park of $10 million each, rather than the $20 million it takes nowadays to make an Uncharted game.

To bring this to an end, the HD game in this example brings in $10 million more in revenue, but the Wii game had savings of $10 million in its development process. Of course, if a game sells multiple millions of copies, then the increased retail price of $60 really starts to pay off. However, if the game fails to cross the million mark, then the game won't be able to break even, much less profit. Since it's more common for AAA games to sell around one million copies (there's really not many games that cross two or even three million), the Wii would be the better option for everything that is not a guaranteed blockbuster.

2) Here you are kinda setting up a strawman argument, because not all HD games are like Assassin's Creed 2. Yes, there are certainly some HD games that could only come to the Wii in butchered form where the result doesn't resemble the source material anymore (Dead Rising is another example of this). But there are many multiplatform games on the HD consoles that could be made for the Wii without significant sacrifices, like the already much talked about Soul Calibur IV or racing games in general (remember what kind of racing games the PS2 was able to run).

Bringing up the history of what does and what does not sell on the Wii is a quite dishonest argument. In the cases of some genres the Wii never even got a single fair chance to prove itself. For example, you could say that racing simulations won't sell on the Wii, because there's no history of one selling on that console. But how could there be, if no such game was ever made? In the case of Ubisoft, Red Steel was a Wii launch game. By March 2007 it had crossed the one million mark which basically proves that there was definitely a market for FPS on the Wii and Red Steel wasn't even a particularly good game. You also have Capcom's Resident Evil 4 port that also crossed the million mark within a few months. Now this begs the question why were these games never really followed up with anything by third parties on the whole? Aside from Activision putting out some FPS, there wasn't much to speak of. When it comes to TPS to capitalize on RE4, Capcom themselves declined to make RE5 (keep in mind that the 3DS can handle RE5-like scenarios, so it's not like it was impossible to build a competent RE5 for the Wii). EA could have reaped the benefits from Capcom foregoing to make RE5, but instead they decided to make their Dead Space into something else.

The bottom line of this point is that Wii owners did everything they could to show third parties that there is a viable market for any popular genre, but third parties decided to not make such games even if there were examples of such games succeeding.

3) This is tied to the first point you were making and is just another result of the higher development costs that come with the HD consoles. Since it's cheaper to develop AAA games on the Wii, do third parties absolutely need the ability to sell DLC like on the HD consoles in order to generate a healthy profit? Probably not, because we know that third party publishers didn't really need DLC during the sixth generation either.

4) Now this point is certainly true, but it's worth pointing out that Microsoft and Sony don't just give benefits to any third parties. In the majority of cases the decision to support third parties comes after the fact. What I mean by this is that third parties first need to have a compelling product before Microsoft and Sony start to shell out money for exclusive DLC or promotions. Considering what third parties build on Nintendo platforms, it shouldn't be shocking that Nintendo isn't throwing money after their games and promoting them. Or can you think of many Wii third party games that would have made Microsoft and Sony spend money on exclusivity?

The basic thought process behind supporting third party products is this: Does this game help us to sell more consoles in any way, shape or form? If the answer is no, then Sony and Microsoft can't be bothered to spend money either. Nintendo gets behind a select few third party games, like Dragon Quest, Professor Layton (DS) and Monster Hunter. Obviously because they believe that it helps them to sell more hardware.

5) Nintendo also decided what the DS would be, how they would market it and they didn't change their stance at any time. Yet the resulting third party support was very different when compared to what the Wii got. This is a really important piece of the puzzle. We have two Nintendo systems running in parallel in terms of philosophy, marketing and processing power compared to their respective competition, but their libraries are like night and day. The DS offers huge variety and a lot of quality software. The Wii is filled with shovelware and even the playable third party games aren't particularly good for the most part. There's barely anything you can put up against a Nintendo made game and say that they are of equal quality.

I wrote a long rebuttal, but it was a case of quantity over quality and I wasn't all that confident with my argument. I'll try and reply later on, but I'll just say that I disagree with a lot of your points.