| Gamerace said: I'm not sure people got bored of motion (except poorly implimented motion), but they did get bored of the lack of 'violent' games on Wii. Or having to play a SD, inferior version of said games (CoD) due to Wii's limited horsepower. So, yes, people ending up buying a 360/PS3 and let their Wii's 'collect dust'. If we could revert time and if 3rd parties had any clue how big Wii would be in 2005/6 when those big, generation defining games started development, it would be interesting to see what would have happened. |
Couple of problems, here - first, the SD-ness of CoD didn't at all cause problems. It was that CoD 4, which what the title that turned the series into a blockbuster, wasn't released on Wii until two years late (and simultaneous with MW2 on PS3/360). They'd already bought the game for 360/PS3, and this continued with future entries in the series. And the whole "Wiis collecting dust" stuff was just internet gamers being idiots - any real gamer played any great game that came to any great console, and the Wii got just as many great games as the other systems... it's just that most of them were first-party.
And if it was about knowledge of how big the Wii would be, then games that released in early 2009 should have showed up on the Wii. Resident Evil 5 is the perfect demonstration of this - released in early 2009, there was plenty of time for them to have the game on the Wii, and Resident Evil 4 did very well on Wii. Wii's success was obvious from early 2007, and didn't even start to let up until late 2008, so it can't be blamed on anything other than Capcom just not bothering to try.
| Gamerace said: Nintendo made a hard decision to not compete with MS/Sony in power/online/graphics. In the short term it served them very VERY well. In the long term, it's bitten them in the arse, HARD. |
On the contrary, it served Nintendo very well in the long term, too. Wii getting stronger third-party support at the expense of stronger overall sales and overall industry growth would have left Nintendo in a situation in which they would have died by 2013. On the other hand, that the Wii had such lacklustre third-party support means that it's a MUCH bigger deal that the Wii U has games like Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed 3, and ZombiU, than it otherwise would have been if Nintendo hadn't already died.
So really, it looks like Nintendo's choices will been much better in overall hindsight. It was only the medium term that it seemed to cause issues, and even then, Wii is still selling (per week) better than Gamecube did for a large proportion of its life. In 2003, the Jul-Sept quarter saw just 810,000 consoles sold, according to Nintendo themselves. That's a worldwide weekly average of 62,000 consoles, which is right about where the Wii is now. And that was just two years after the Gamecube launched, and in a more active sales time of the year than we're currently in. Note that that period in the Gamecube's life saw the release of Mario Golf, F-Zero GX, Wario World, and other titles - indeed, 2003 was the year that the Gamecube saw the largest number of titles released. So it's not like it was a game drought (as opposed to the Wii, which has... what, maybe 10 games listed for release in the next 3 months?)
