| Squilliam said:
A Nintendo system is Nintendo's play ground. They design their systems to suit themselves first and foremost and whilst they do let other people play there too it is an entirely different attitude to how Sony and especially Microsoft designed their systems. They have a completely different perspective and their relationship with other publishers is different to the other system manufacturers because they dominate their system software sales in a way which Microsoft and Sony don't do. This leads to a self fulfilling prophecy where other developers put their best efforts on other systems and leads to the phrase 'only Nintendo games sell well on Nintendo systems'. The major problem with courting mainly general audiences is the way that it skews the distribution of game sales to only a few individual titles and makes success as much having the right title at the right time (luck) as it is quality game design whilst at the same time reducing the variety and the number of game studios which can survive. The hardcore gamer may be an annoying individual but he or she is the one who buys more than just the big titles and lets other titles at least recoup some or all of their costs. If you have a combination of only a few games selling big and Nintendo games with a natural advantage on the system designed specifically for those games with an audience already predisposed for them you have big problems for major 3rd party publishers. |
There is no magic to Nintendo's success on Nintendo's consoles, and third party publishers would be just as successful as Nintendo if they would just follow Nintendo's lead.
Years ago I saw an interview with Kayne West where he was talking about why he was such a successful rapper and (while his talent can be debated) one of the things he mentioned is actually very important here; essentially, he said that there were no "Throw away lines" (or something like that) and compared himself to rappers who wrote phrases simply to rhyme with something else they produced. This relates to Nintendo because there are no throw-away games being produced by Nintendo, and the same can not be said about third party publishers.
To put a number to it, around 66% of third party games released to Nintendo platforms are throw away games where the publisher assumes the game is going to fail so they starve it of support, resources, and marketing and then seems surprised that it fails. To use Activisions' 2012 releases on the Wii as an example:
Skylanders Giants (80% on Gamerankings)
The Amazing Spider Man (64.33% on Gamerankings)
Transformers Prime the Game (63% on Gamerankings)
Battleship (55% on Gamerankings)
Wreck-it-Ralph (45% on Gamerankings)
Men in Black: Alien Crisis (40% on Gamerankings)
Ice Age Continental Drift (30.5% on Gamerankings)
There is obviously no effort to make something that sells because it is high quality, there is only an effort to get something out to cash in on the popularity of a licensed property they hold at the moment. If Activision was run like Nintendo, Battleship, Wreck-it-Ralph, Men In Black, and Ice Age would (probably) have not been made, their budgets would have been re-allocated to the teams behind Skylanders Giants, The Amazing Spider Man, and Transformers prime.
Third party publishers repeatedly burn their customers by releasing shitty games and those same customers learn to choose Nintendo franchises in the future because they know they're good games.
