| RolStoppable said:
Well, when Microsoft was buying their way into the video game industry (a $4 billion loss in four years was unprecedented), they were trying to get a hold of important third party IPs. The Xbox was a defensive move to stop Sony from taking control over the living room, so they were naturally trying to do their best to diminish Sony. However, the PS2 already had such a big foothold in the market that the majority of third parties were unwilling to make their games Xbox exclusive. For example, even Madden was up for debate, but EA opted for multiplatform development, because it allowed them to snatch the exclusive NFL license and thus push 2k games out of the American football market (they could make much more money that way). So pretty much the only thing Microsoft could do for the time being was to establish themselves as the #2 player in the business and prepare for the next generation (which ultimately led to them rushing the 360 out of the door and subsequently, the whole RRoD fiasco). Thus their natural target became Nintendo and rumor has it that Microsoft started to pay third parties to not develop for the GC. Since historically Nintendo got branded as "kiddie" by all of their competitors, Microsoft pursued that path as well. There's quite a clear pattern in which multiplats ceased to become available on the GC. Essentially, everything that did fit into the "kiddie" category made it through while more "mature" games often times did not. Remember, Nintendo had mainline exclusivity of Resident Evil at that point in time, so it's not like other third parties would have had no market to work with on the GC. Eventually GC sales started to suffer, because the software support began to slow down. Afterwards it was easy for statements like "Only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo systems" and "Mature games don't sell on Nintendo systems" to spread and be accepted as truth (by gamers and developers alike). And it's incredibly hard for Nintendo to disprove this notion, because third parties have been largely unwilling to even try to make an effort since then. |
I can understand an exclusivity incentive to make a game just on the xbox, but incentive sto make a game just on the xbox and PS2, that's shady. I don't think that's what happened exactly, maybe something similar?
Possibly, some of the games that went XB/PS2 were originally PS2 games that Microsoft paid in to get a piece of the pie (kinda like FXIII). That must've left Nintendo trailing behind with either the scraps, or nothing. It must also be easier to sign-off on a project when there is guaranteed money from the get-go (incentives), rather than borrowing and getting returns on investment (no incentives).
Another thing that's possible. When business people make projections, they don't have all the data of all the games ever made like we did earlier. They'll take either their past projects or the projects of other big companies as examples to draw a road map. Maybe the numbers ultimately didn't please them.
What if it's a mix of the two?
In our earlier analysis, we took the final sales at the end of the gen. But the thing we didn't do was look at the trend of the ratio over the years. If it was trending downwards, then that could explain the concern. What about the HW sales? How was the trend as compared to the cube? Was the cube more front-loaded? It's too bad we don't have that data.
