| zarx said: This doesn't conflict with what I said at all. With the PS2 controling that majority of the market lots of third partie developers developed for the system exclusively. The games that did span all systems were the ones that could afford to split their effort without negatively impacting the game or where contractually obligated to such as licensed and sports titles. The titles that were exclusive to the other systems from third parties were much less common and mostly due to deals from MS and Nintendo or thanks to the PC like API and architecture of the XBOX making it easy to bring titles over, and games like Halo established that there was an audience for more PC like games on the system. But none of that conflicts with my point that publishers don't inherently want to be multiplatform unless they have too. While the market share of Xbox and Gamecube were small they still established their own market niches that were big enough that they were worth supporting for some titles. They weren't supported because publishers wanted the market to be split up, but because the audience was already split up. Again it's not up to third parties to build a userbase on any system, but to find the ecosystems where there is an audience for the game. The benifit is that you reserve the limited resources of a small dev team that is already stretched thin, and the dev team (or at least the engine lead) thought that the Wii U version would be inferior and show the teams work in a poor light. Add to the fact that the Wii U has yet to prove that it can build an audience for that type of game big enough to support the port there is very little incentive. The PS3 and X360 both managed to foster very similar audiences which meant that the audience was esentially split so devs had to serve both platforms. Publishers didn't support both because they wanted the audience to be on both but because the audience supported both. That and they were very similar in terms of capablities. As you yourself say 3rd party games don't (usually) decide the platforms the audience picks up, the 1st partys are the ones that decide that, 3rd parties just follow the crowd. My reasoning is consistant if there is a viable market for the types of games on a system then publishers will support that audience, but the audience has to be there (or at least they have to belive that the audience will be there). |
Regarding PS2, you seem to have skipped the main point of what I said, and focused on the "also note that", which purely noted that you still saw multiplatform games despite the lopsided sales. If you want to respond to the actual argument, rather than the side note, I'll happily debate that with you.
And it's up to third parties to build a fanbase on systems. And yes, to build a userbase, to some degree. If the only games you could get at all on a Nintendo system were Nintendo titles, it wouldn't sell anywhere near as well. Third party games build the userbase, by increasing the perceived value of the system (a person buys a system when its perceived value to them is greater than the cost of buying the system). As for the "Ecosystems" part, I'm sorry, but ecosystems are set up by the third parties just as much as the hardware maker. And by the way, the biggest argument developers and publishers have used in the past is "you can't compete with Nintendo on their console" - if Nintendo had focused on making more FPSes, third parties would have said "We can't compete with Nintendo in FPSes, so why bother making FPSes for the system?" Basically, Nintendo is damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
THQ is not a small dev team. If 4A Games wasn't big enough to handle both development and porting, they wouldn't have initially claimed that the game was coming to the Wii U... but more importantly, THQ could easily arrange for another company to handle porting duties. It happens all the time, even with IPs that aren't owned by the publisher. THQ could easily have organised it. As for the "dev team thought it would be inferior", that was rumour (in the form of a non-quote attribution of an opinion as stated by some site, can't remember which one now), and has since been contradicted by people in both THQ and 4A Games. And again, you invoke the classic chicken-and-egg problem, in that the system has to magically prove that it has an audience for a game before having that game put on there, even though, to prove it, it has to have such a game on there.
I'm really sick and tired of this circular argument being put forward, so I'll emphasise it yet again, by spelling it out in stages:
1. If Nintendo makes a strong enough game in the genre to prove the audience is there (or to create the audience), third parties go "Can't compete with Nintendo on their own hardware". So Nintendo doesn't expand into genres that they don't already dominate.
2. Nintendo doesn't make such a game, and now developers and publishers declare that they need proof that there's an audience for such a game on the system.
3. System owners make their desire for such a game explicitly known, and so developers and publishers make a quick, lower quality spinoff game as a "test game" for the system.
4. System owners buy the test game in relatively large numbers, compared with the quality of the game, and so developers and publishers decide that such a game is what owners want.
5. Developers and publishers flood the system with more spinoffs and low quality titles... many of which then flop... rather than releasing a real game.
6. Developers and publishers declare that this proves there's no market for the games on the system, and proceed to ignore it completely.
In the rare cases that developers have actually put quality titles on Nintendo systems, either in genres where they compete with Nintendo or in uncontested genres, they've seen great results. But the same stages I just listed above happen over and over again, and I'm fed up with people like you playing along with it. It is the developers' and publishers' jobs to establish markets on the systems. Nintendo's (and MS's and Sony's) job is to build an install base that can act as the seed for such markets.
As for the 360 and PS3 split point - again, my point is that, if it's already a multiplatform game, it should be on all suitable platforms. Otherwise, it should be exclusive. If you're already spending money to port the game to a second platform, the costs to port it to a third platform are relatively minimal. Especially when all information from developers to date have said that it's easy to port games to the Wii U, that in many cases it has taken no more than a couple of weeks to get it running properly. And again, the audience can only be there if the game is there FIRST. If you can't recognise this obvious fact - that the audience comes to the game, not the other way around, then there's no point continuing to debate the rest of it. It's such an elementary point that just about everything else rests on it. And you've even agreed with it in a previous post, just not in this context (in that post, it was "games sell systems, not the other way around").
