New developers will do the best on Nintendo hardware

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lilbroex said:

Soundwave said:

lilbroex said:

Soundwave said:

That's because the Wii can't run RE5 without massive compromises. Ditto for Dead Space.

GoldenEye, Red Steel 2, Dead Space Extraction, Mad World, Little King Story, House of the Dead Overkill, Maramusa, were decent games.

There just isn't a huge market on the Wii for these types of experiences, even if they have a 100 million userbase. The Wii was basically the GameCube audience + some nostalgic throwback audience interested in a little retro Mario + a crap ton of soccer mom/fitness concious/hipster "blue ocean" audience that wouldn't touch something like Resident Evil 5 with a hundred foot pole to begin with.

You are defening the contradictions to your own argument in making comments about compromies and still that is not true.

The compromises would not be so great. RE5 would have simply been built in RE4's engine and it would have been no issue with the userbase(RE4 sold excellently). The extraction engine itself could have been used for porting Dead Space(it worked fine for Goldeneye which also sold well). Those issues were never the real reasons. Devs just didn't care enough. They handicapped their own games then complained about their lack of success. They only used the Wii for a quick easy buck. They brought about their own failure.

Most developers didn't even try with the Wii. Most of the games didn't even look or play as good as Gamecube games. Name one "good" third party game that had real effort put into on the Wii that didn't make a profit before 2011.

Though all of this is completely beside the point of the topic of this thread.

Barely making a profit isn't good enough. When developers see a userbase of that size, they want bigger sales.

They can "make a profit" on the PS3/360 too.

Fact is, there hasn't really been a "break out" huge success story of an indie game developer on the Wii or even DS.

There are several on the iOS/PC/XBLA side. If you're an indie developer that's where you're going to flock to.

It's just business, people take it as being personal, it's not. If there was a huge market for all these cool, core experiences on Wii, developers certainly would've supported the system with them.

When Nintendo can't even sell a product like Fatal Frame or Excitebots or The Last Story to really break out performance, what chance does a developer doing Little King Story have? Virtually none. Even things like Pikmin and F-Zero I think would've been a hard sell for Nintendo on Wii so they didn't even bother. If you want to sell product on Wii it's gotta either have Mario in it, or it has to be within the confines of the fitness/dance/party game formula as the platform was really driven by sales of Wii Sports + Fit.

They did not "barely" make a profit. They made a good profit, it was just not immediate. Most PS3/360 barely made a profit. It put Factor 5 and Free Radical out of buisiness.

There has never been a "break out" huge success story of an indie game developer on the PS3 or 360 either. The ones who did release on the Wii had good success like Shin'en and the peope who made defendin the castle and Square-Enix. The facts still stand. Good games sold well on the Wii. There is not a single flop that was a truly good game exept for Zack & Wiki which had no marketing whatsoever.

The Last Story made a profit in Japan(Mistwalker's second best selling game). All games release after the announcement of the Wii U were released on a dead console like Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast.

Have you ever looked at the sells of a Fatal Frame game? They have never been big selling. It sold as much on the Wii in each respective country as it sold on the PS2 versions in general. In fact, I think FF4 was the best selling Japanese Fatal Frame ever.

You keep drawing conclusions that contradict the facts.

Once again, games on the Wii cost 1/3 what they cost to make for the PS3/360, so the profit margin was 3 time higher. Wii game games also had a long shelf life. Any game sold on the Wii after the Wii U was announced received little to no attention as NIntendo pretty much killed the console and stopped supporting it. There was also the piracy issue that came into effect on the Wii after 2008 but thats another story. Even then, the games still made a profit.

What's your point then?

If everything's so great and fine and dandy with Nintendo, then naturally there should be developers ripping down Nintendo's door to make content.

Of course none of this is Nintendo's fault, nor could it have anything to do with the possibility that Nintendo's increase in userbase largely came from a blue ocean audience that isn't interested in very many core experiences to begin with.

It's easy for you to sit there and say "well they should make more games for Nintendo". What exactly do you have invested other than an emotional attachment to Nintendo franchises? You have no skin in the game.

It's easy to talk when it's not half your life savings or your livelyhood riding on a game project. I suspect if it was, you'd sober up to market realties pretty quickly and have a much more realistic look at what actually sells in the Nintendo ecosystem. When these realities are present developers have to look what the software ecosystem is for each platform. And clearly on the Wii and DS, most of them passed.

Indie/new developers are fine, in fact today is a kind of rebirth of all types of small developers being able to bring all types of non-conventional experiences to millions of consumers thanks to things like iOS, Steam, XBLA, etc. They're not sitting around waiting for Nintendo to "save them", they're doing just fine.

Case in point: that Trine 2 title you keep hyping up for Wii U ... that developer and that series made its name and got introduced to the broad gaming community through Steam and XBLA/PSN, not any Nintendo platform. There are multitudes of stories like that.