The Nintendo Third Party Dilemma: How we got here and why (from Gaf)

[Mnementh]

I don't know much about NES and N64, but I think it doesn't matter too much. Yes, some third parties may be angry from stuff that dates back to this time, but mostly it is more about making money than about revenge. Even more so, since most likely the CEOs from that era are long replaced.

So I pick a part about the Wii:
"So what happened here? Well, developers initially started their investments thinking the PS3 was going to be the industry leader, and after the price reveal they didn't change their strategy. Why? Because they realized that even if PS3 wasn't the market leader, it is smarter to release games that can be PS3+360+PC than just the Wii alone. The Wii put itself in a position where not only were the ports it could potentially receive extremely difficult to make comparatively (everything from the basics of an engine would have to be completely redesigned to critical online features being stripped out because of the horrendous online infrastructure), but most games would have to be made for Wii alone in mind if they were to really take advantage of the systems Wiimote technology and thus be competitive."

While the part about the devs initially developing for PS3 makes sense, the following doesn't make sense. The author here says, that it was more useful to develop for the PS3/X360/PC-market. But one thing about the PC-market is, that not everyone owns an expensive modern computer, many play games on older machines. To adjust for that, the games contain settings, that allow them to adjust to slower machines. This brings the games even to very less powerful PCs. PC that were not much in front of the Wii, if at all. So basically they already ported the games. Porting games to machines of different power is not difficult since the introduction of 3D. You have a lot of options to scale here. That's why games get ported to smartphones. It would have been not too hard to port to the Wii. And yes, the Wii got some port, including COD. So that's a no reason.

Also saying games must be developed with the Wiimote in mind and are basically different games is wrong. The Wiimote+Nunchuk can be used like a more classical controller if the buttons are used instead of motion-control. A lot of games did exactly that. In addition the Wii had a classic controller. Many games supported that.

The author doesn't make sense. There are a lot of reasons why 3rd-parties desert Nintendo on some consoles. But they did support the Gamecube and they do support the WiiU.