Is Nintendo's third-party ecosystem really in danger?

[Viper1]

DanneSandin said:

oniyide said:

DanneSandin said:

RolStoppable said:
Summary: Nothing has changed. The biggest obstacle to third party success are still third parties themselves. Also, Western publishers still suck hard on handhelds.

What I don't understand is why don't they step up their game? They could sell just as much as Nintendo, but they prefer to do crappy games (well, not all of them) and complain about how they can't sell games on Nintendo HW...

you can count on one hand how much 3rd party games sell as well as Nintendo games period. GTA, COD, JD. two of those were adapted for portables with varying results. GTA games did ok to good on PSP, not so much DS.  COD games sold like crap on DS and the one PSP entry did alright. I would like to see a JD on 3DS, not cause i would buy it, just to see if people would

Well, ok, I worded that wrong. Very, very few games can match Nintendo sales - but the truth is, that if they'd bothered they (3rd party) could have done much better on Nintendo consoles. I mean, a lot of Wii owners got themselves a second console just to play 3rd party games. That's evidence for my theory right there; 3rd parties could do well on Nintendo consoles - whether it's handheld or home.

You are correct. 

Since the N64 days, 3rd parties have no put as much effort on the Nintendo consoles as they have on the other consoles and consumers ahve responded by buying games from a publisher they trust to provide good quality - Nintendo.

The issue started on the N64 because Nintendo's decision to use cartridges instead of CD's reduced the per unit profit potential for publishers so it made sense financially to put more effort on the disc based consoles.   The problem is that the mind set, software ecosystem and stmata generated from that carried over to the GC despite having a disc based medium.

This further ascerbated the 1st party / 3rd party disparity which leads us to now.   The fact that 3DS launched with far better 3rd party support than did DS and that Wii U is way ahead of Wii's intial 3rd party support suggests this aricle is not only full of crap but is riding the journalistic mentality of 'Nintendo doomed' articles are good business.