RolStoppable said:
Most of the games you named here would have been laughed off as halfassed efforts in the sixth generation. The one game I played of those you mentioned is Tomb Raider: Underworld and if that is compared to the PS2 versions of Legend and Anniversary (which are 8/10 games), then it's still a bad game. Underworld on PS2/Wii is a 5/10 game at best, because it clearly fails to meet the standards of the previous two games. It's not the existence of Underworld on the HD consoles that makes the Wii's Underworld bad, the game is bad because it is bad. But the original point was that third parties lost serious money on the Wii which cannot really be the case when the games we are talking about did cut corners, both in development and marketing costs. You try to pass off Modern Warfare 3 as a big effort when one month before the game's release Activision still hadn't even bothered to release screenshots. The reality is that MW3 on Wii was a budget game. Mid-range development costs for Wii standards with virtually zero money spent on marketing. 500k units is enough to pull in profits. The real problem is that people, including you, too often pretend that the Wii got AAA games. AAA by definition means high end development costs for the platform in question, plus a good chunk of money spent on marketing (usually equal or greater than development costs). As soon as either one of these requirements is not met, it is not a AAA game. All of those Wii third party games you mentioned in your post are not AAA games and thus the level of sales needed to break even is way below the 1m mark. So when these games sold only around 500k or even only 250k (in case of ports from sixth gen games), they could still pull in profits. Consider how many studios were closed due to failures in the seventh gen and how many of these closures happened due to Wii games. People are trying to tell you that publishers lost serious money on the Wii while the HD consoles were supposedly the sacred land for third parties, but it were 360/PS3 games that put the most developers out of business. So who or what are you going to believe? Those people or real events? |
I have to admit the Wii version of Underworld was not great. Anniversary was much better.
Wii did not get the same treatment as HD and I do contend that is because no matter how much effort was put into it, people would still call a port of an HD game a 'poor' port.
Certainly, without question, Wii didn't get the sort of multi-million dollar game investments that the HD consoles did (which makes sense in a way because it doesn't cost that much to make a non-HD game). And a lot of the marquee 3rd party games skipped Wii completely.
Regardless of whether you consider them AAA or not, there are absolutely clear cases of developers/publishers losing money on Wii games - and cases of those same publishers making a lot of money off Wii games.
Absolutely, most of the blame for developers going under can be laid at the feet of HD development costs. Lair, Haze, Darksiders II and others are notorious examples. The closest example I can think of for Wii would be Blue Tongue's De Blob 2 but that was also on HD consoles. Or DDI - who went broke making Ninjabread Man, Anabus II and other shovelware for Wii. That's what Deduce must have been referring too! Poor DDI. DAMN Wii for causing you to go bankrupt.
