| Cobretti2 said:
You cnanot solely blame Nintendo for the 3rd party situation. Lets look at it N64 even with its so called limitations etc has some of the best games of that generation. GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Turok, Mario, LOZ: OOT, blast corps, 1080, banjo, RE, starfox to name a few. Developers who tried got rewarded with success. GCN - again had fantastic games. but sadly its purple colour made people think it was childish so all the cool kids at school didnt want anything to do with it. Wii - compare capcom, EA efforts on GCN against Wii and you will see what I mean by 3rd party devs not caring about the Wii. |
A lot of what Nintendo did resulted in third-party developers not developing on their consoles.
N64: Most of the games you mentioned were on 1st or 2nd party. The power meant some PC devs released games (ID, Blizzard even released Starcraft), but in general it was cheaper to release on PS1 or Saturn due to the extra expense of the cartridge. Games at this stage were becomming expensive to develop and they needed to reduce costs. The CD format was the primary way they acheived this. The relationship with third-parties during the SNES era probably didn't help matters. That's heavily on Nintendo for not keeping up with the changing market conditions.
GCN: The design choices were Nintendo's to make, meaning the purple colour and proprietary media. The small user base probably didn't help and nor did Microsoft likely entering developer mind-share with their PC-like console and developer tools. Sony had masses of market share so they were a given. If left with a choice between a manufacturer that gives you many PC-like tools you're used to and help keep costs down versus a manufacturer who have a smaller media format with average dev tools, who're you going to use?
Wii: EA actually supported the Wii fairly well compared to some others. Ubisoft also started with a lot of support for Wii on release before concentrating on the HD consoles. The devs obviously weren't getting as much return as they were expecting considerring the market share Wii had. The lack of programmable shaders on the GPU also meant it was harder to make multi-plat games for all 3 consoles.
