Soundwave said:
It had Resident Evil exclusivity and other exclusives from Namco, Sega, and Capcom and lots of big multi-plat titles like Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil, 007 Nightfire, Timesplitters 2, Soul Calibur 2, etc. It didn't get the GTA games or Final Fantasy, but Sony was smart enough to lock those up and had leverage over publishers because they had such a huge headstart on Nintendo/Microsoft (and actually took advantage of it). It's not the fault of third parties that Nintendo opted to corner themselves into a kiddy reputation with the look of the console and cell-shading Zelda or that Nintendo made some odd choices with their core franchises which led to low hardware sales. That's all on Nintendo. It's not a third parties job to brand and market a console, that's on the hardware maker. Third parties don't have time for "potential" in today's business, games cost more than ever to make, they have limited resources and have to pick which platforms are going to bring them back the best returns. Instead of making a balanced, modern console that was easy for third parties to develop their next-gen engines on and taking advantage of a year head start, Nintendo opted to (once again) bet everything on a controller gimmick, only this time it isn't taking off with casuals at all. That's just the law of averages evening out, when you gamble on miracles, eventually you will get burned. |
Sony didn't "lock up" GTA, it was on Xbox too, but not Gamecube.
And third parties lose nothing by adding Wii U while keeping 360 and PS3. Porting isn't expensive.