| RolStoppable said: They don't even realize what's going to hit them. Nintendo's self-destruction will also have an effect on their beloved companies, because now there isn't going to be a platform where third parties can rake in the cash with cheaply produced games. Money that was used to subsidize development for the 360 and PS3 until these systems had big enough installed bases to become self-sustaining. Admittedly, some publishers never really reached that point and continued to incur losses. The upcoming transitional period is going to be tough for third parties. Activision is about the only Western publisher who has a reliable cash cow in Call of Duty. EA sells 10m+ copies of FIFA each year, but that's still not good enough to make a profit overall. The software markets on the 360 and PS3 are on the decline and it will take at least a couple of years before the Nextbox and PS4 truly get going. This time there is no DS and Wii. Mobile isn't going to pick up the slack, because consumers are conditioned to expect free games. |
Why do you think publishers are planning their business around a period of time that only lasted maybe a couple years (after the PS2 had died [for SW at least], and before the PS3/360 had really taken up its reigns). In 2007 the Wii sold 74.8 million units of software. At least 45.3 million of these sales were Nintendo games. So that left third parties with 29.5 million or less. In the same time the PS3 and 360 sold 98.6 million and the PS2 shipped 165 million. I'm not going to parse out how much of those were first party, but it's not going to be more than 89%.
Even with the declines, the PS3 and 360 have sold over 50 million units of software, and the year is barely a quarter of the way through. It was the PS2, not the Wii that carried third parties through the early years of the generation. Even more so if we look at the year after the 360 launch rather than 2007. In that year the PS2 did around 200 million units of software, while the Wii did about 3.3 million units of third party software. It will be the same case this generation. Even if the Wii U had been a runaway success like the Wii, the PS3 and 360 would still have sold significantly more software.
Long story short, I think you are overestimating the impact that Wii software had on third party revenues. Especially if we're talking about the period of generational transition. They certainly had some notable successes with cheap to produce games, but the Wii was no PS2.
I didn't really touch on the DS impact, but it had a similar situation of a very high proportion of its software sales being first party, and it didn't pass the PS2 in SW sales till 2008, and even then the PS2 might have had more third party sales. The one exception I'd make would be Ubisoft, they did quite well pouring a bunch of cheap shovelware on the DS, and they are unlikely to have a repeat of that. For the most part though, other western third parties never had very good handheld support.
