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marley on 22 November 2013
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DerNebel said:
marley said:


It's true, Nintendo fans don't find Sonic to be new, they find it to be mediocre.  Dropping sales?  Compared to what, their successes on the Wii?

Nintendos fanbase is unwilling to give them attention, because for 20 years 3rd party companies treated them like second-class citizens or just ignored them entirely.  They gave terrible support to all of Nintendo's consoles and there is always some excuse for it.  The excuse now is that it's the consumers fault, but that's bogus.  They created an entire demographic that looks down on their games by giving them poor service for decades. 

I'd contend that 3rd parties need as many consumers and as much capital as they can get, consider how many have gone out of business or had to merge to stay alive. 

Consumers spend money to reward a business for delivering a product that they want.  That onus is 100% on the business.  Instead of giving the consumers 'something they want to buy', 3rd parties give them the ultimatum 'buy what we want to give you'.  If 3rd parties want to continue to ignore a relatively large consumer base and it's potential captial, well that's their business (it's just bad business).  If they lack the creative capacity to create games that can compete with Nintendo's IPs, well that's not the consumers fault either. 

Oh right, third parties just shunned Nintendo for no reason at all, it had nothing to do with Nintendo majorly fucking them over in the NES/SNES era. They didn't jump ship because the N64 was horrible to develop for, still used cartridges and had a way smaller userbase than the PS1. It wasn't third parties treating Nintendo like second-class it was the other way round, Nintendo thought they could do anything they wanted with third parties and that bit them in the ass.

And Nintendos fans are just the same, to this day still treating 3rd party games as inherently worse than Nintendos', even going as far as caliing them unable to make something to compete with Nintendos' IPs (see what I did there?).

Also, yeah sure publishers need to make more cash that's true and if they'd make any on Wii U then they'd support it more, but making a Wii U port (which is not free)  and then selling 100.000 copies (if at all) of it, well let's just say I doubt they're making any cash with that. So it's absolutely not bad business for third parties to ignore the Wii U, what would be bad business is investing tons of money into a game that in theory is "something the Wii U fans want to buy", which in turn would probably have alot less appeal (ergo less sales) to the PS/Xbox crowd, just for that game to sell well under expectations on the Wii U, because "third parties treat us bad","I don't know the game","it's not from Nintendo".

Now, Nintendo fans are interested in other types of games than PS/Xbox gamers, but that didn't stop even games that do in theory appeal to the Nintendo crowd from bombing and sure third parties might need some iterations of a game before it really reaches its potential but like you've said they don't exactly have that much money to spare, so they can't risk losing money on 2-3 games before making any profit, not like there is any indication that a risk like that would ever pay off on Wii U.

So now it's Nintendo's fault and not the consumers.... and that's fine.  That is more in line with reality at least.  Either way, you're still giving a pass to 3rd parties that they don't deserve.  Third party companies were perfectly capable of making money on the Wii, but that certainly didn't cause them to fully support it (shocker).  What was the excuse for leaving money on the table this time?  That they couldn't make games in HD?

No one said anything about them investing 'tons of money' to make a game Nintendo fans will want.  How much do you think a game like Wii Sports costs to make?  Nobody is expecting 3rd parties to invest in 200M games like GTA 5, designed only for Nintendo fans.  They could have made games on the Wii for a relatively small investment and still reach a very large consumer base.  Most chose not to.  Instead, they continued to full-heartedly support a failing console (at the time) and they released plenty of games to very low sales.  They were perfectly fine with the risk of 'losing money on 2-3 games' then.  I don't remember too many ultimatums being thrown around.  I don't recall the consumers being blamed for the low sales.  It's a double standard and it's bs. 

They make games that bomb on every system.  It's delusional to think otherwise.  You just seem to believe that only some consoles are worth that risk.  They propped up the struggling ps3 and created an environment where the console could succeed.  They invested money fostering a userbase that they could succeed with, that simply wasn't there at the time.  Why is that situation different in your mind?

Half-assed stripped down ports are not a good way to impress potential customers.  It's not like consumers are arbitrarily making the choice to avoid 3rd party games on Nintendo consoles.  They do it for a reason.  They have been condition to think that Nintendo games are better, because on that console - they are.  Yes, third party games have been unable to compete well head to head with Nintendo IPs.  Do you find this statement to be false?

Ignoring an entire demographic of customers, simply because you are not interested in making products that they will find interesting, is in fact 'bad business'.  Spin it however you want, but that is bad business.  What is good business?  Ubisoft making a game like 'Just Dance' for the Wii and cashing in on it hard.  It doesn't take a huge $200M investment to make a game that people will enjoy and purchase.