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HappySqurriel on 01 December 2012
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noname2200 said:
HappySqurriel said:

It sounds odd but I think of the Wii U as (sort of) being in a position similar to what the Wii would have been in had they released in 2005 (and not been penalized for releasing too early), and the XBox 360 launched in 2006; with everything else about the systems' first 2 years on the market remaining essentially the same. The net result is a market where the Wii would have had 16+ million more units sold, and the XBox 360 would have had 8+ million fewer units sold, when decisions were being made about which platform games were going to be made on; and that 24+ Million unit swing would have had a huge impact on game development in for games released in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

The counter-example to this idea though is the Dreamcast. It was out long before the PS2 released, and built up a respectable userbase before any of its rival systems released, yet developers largely shunned it because they "knew" that the PS2 was going to be the better system to develop for. It was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I submit that that mindset remains true today.

Perhaps the Wii's spectacular early success may have convinced some third parties to take development for it more seriously, but in light of the fact that development for modern games takes two+ years of lead time (more when developing a new engine...as required by the HD consoles) I would argue that the majority of third-parties still would have devoted their resources to HD development instead of making high-quality Wii titles, as they "knew" that the HD consoles were the future. By the time they realized how wrong they were (and many of them lack the willingness to ever do so), it would have been too late; the bed would be made, and the consoles' identities would have been established. The fact that third-parties never amounted to much on the Wii, notwithstanding unprecedented hardware sales, is pretty strong evidence of that.

 

Relating all this back to the Wii U, I'm not convinced that its strength, if any, comes from its early release. Rather, it should logically be the cost of development: if Epic is right, and the PS4/720 "only" double development costs, the entry price will till be too high for a lot of third-parties, and even those that can afford to buy-in will only do so with the safest of titles. While I still believe that a smart and aggressive Nintendo could have carried the prior generation on its own, I've come around to the idea that they don't want to do so, and that no other developer seems capable of carrying a system single-handedly. So third-parties' behavior is going to play a large role in determining whether the Wii U floats or sinks.

At the moment, I choose "sink."


I would argue that the Dreamcast makes a pretty poor counter-point primarily because of the abysmal financial position of Sega at the time coupled with the long string of mistakes that alienated their core customers, and the fact that the PS2 was the successor to the previous generation's market leading console which was also the most successful system of all time (when the PS2 launched).

Essentially, when has the successor to a market leading console (or the successor to a 30+ Million selling system) launched a year or more before the competition and not outsold that competition? The closest we get is the XBox 360 vs. the PS3/Wii and the Genesis vs. the SNES, where (in both cases) the system that launched first saw a massive increase in sales; and even the poor Dreamcast was selling far better than the Sega Saturn, and would have likely sold 2 to 3 times as many units as the Saturn did had Sega been able to afford to keep it alive.