Soundwave said:
The Wii failed as being an alternative for developers that actually made real games but at a lower budget. Other victims were NST who's Project: HAMMER was screwed around and "casual-fied" by NOA until it was finally just cancelled outright (bet more than a few people lost their job there). NOA basically also passed on publishing The Last Story and barely could be bothered to release a very limited run of Xenoblade here. No effort whatsoever to cultivate an ecosystem for anything non-casual/non-franchise based basically. Of course these devs are going to continue to stick with Sony/MS, Nintendo is not doing anything for them, if they can't even be bothered to sell non-casual/non-mascot IP like The Last Story here, what chance does a little guy have? I'm sorry but Nintendo is really not the champion of the "little guy" publisher, on the Wii they didn't give a sh*t, even though they could've probably created an iTunes of indie gaming early on with Wiiware, they instead opted to make the service maddeningly user unfriendly (only 512MB of storage for ages) and restrictive to developers. The real alternative for the indie game community became a little bit of XBLA and very much the iOS revolution and the re-emergence of the PC market thanks to Steam. |
I love how tiny independent developers producing niche games with limited marketing support are used to show that third party developers "tried" ...
Initial efforts by third party publishers on the Wii sold reasonably well for what they produced, after all Call of Duty 3, Red Steel and Resident Evil 4: Wii edition but with each year that followed the number of core games release (as a portion of the library) steadily declined, the developers became smaller, only new IPs were used, and the marketing budget disappeared. Gamers were told that games were being released to see if there was a market for core games on the Wii, the publisher claimed that they had expected sales of 500,000 units, and when it actually sold over 1 million they introduced another test game; and when that game passed the test another test game was introduced.
Publishers did not want core games to be successful on the Wii, they bet heavily on the struggling HD consoles and would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if gamers didn't buy the PS3 or XBox 360. While I doubt all publishers learned their lesson I'm sure some did, the Wii U launching first should help the Wii U attract some support prior to it being allocated to Sony or Microsoft's systems, and (I expect) Microsoft and Sony will release more modest systems which will likely allow cross platform development with the Wii U.
