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Gamerace on 18 June 2012
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Aielyn said:
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.

While I'm in obvious agreement about the impact of not having CoD4, you are conveniently ignoring the fact that CoD:WaW sold very well - almost 2m copies.  However while each yearly edition of CoD continued to see sales increases on HD systems, each yearly edition on Wii sold roughly half of the previous entry.  Even last years outstanding CoD:MW3 which was as identical to it's HD counterparts as Wii's tech will allow, sold pitifully, whereas it's sold huge amounts on HD systems.   By your logic, sales of the CoD franchise should have increased with each edition (which were progressively better on all accounts) on Wii too.  This is simply not the case.   

Same holds true for other 3rd party series on Wii (and even 1st party).  Sequels always sold progressively less, not more as they typically do on HD consoles.  See Tiger Woods, No More Heroes, Super Mario Galaxy, Madden, or any series on Wii.

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.

I'd say Wii got a ton of great 3rd party games, but mostly more niche, quirkly titles (No More Heroes, Little King Story, Sakura Wars, Zack & Wiki, Etc., etc.) than the HD's mainstream offerings.  Not mostly 1st party at all.

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.

I agree with this.  Clearly, as I stated, Capcom felt 'core' gamers would migrate from Wii to HD systems and so didn't bother putting RE5 on Wii.    This was very disappointing, however, I also felt RE5 was also very un-RE and therefore not a big loss.    In fact all titles on HD were (IMHO) bastardized by FPS/TPS elements - RE, Silent Hill, Dragon's Age, Mass Effect, the new Tomb Raider and many others.   I'm glad FPS elements were mostly kept out of Wii games.

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.

I disagree.  Wii was so popular it could have sold for $400 at launch.  Sure demand wouldn't have been as high, but Nintendo couldn't support the demand for the first two years.  Having less of it, until the price slowly dropped would have been better.   They could have made it HD at launch, sold very strongly still, and had ALL the 3rd party games as well as Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Mario Kart, etc.    This would have made Wii the PS2 of this generation.  It'd still be selling strongly today if this was the case and Nintendo would not be losing money (or as much, the Yen is killing them) now.  Wii probably would have finished with 80% market share instead of 45%.

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?)