That lack of third party support is good for Nintendo

[Mr Khan]

pokoko said:
Nintendo being cast in the role of the victim interests me. This is the company that tried to rule the gaming industry with an iron fist while vacuuming up most of the profits for themselves. That came back to sting them, perhaps is still stinging them, yet now people rush to say that third parties should are the villains here? Bullshit.

They are all companies trying to do the best they can to make money. Nintendo is no better or worse. Sorry, but that's the truth. We already know that they aren't altruistic saints simply fighting the good fight for the sake of humanity.

Now, as far as Nintendo improving because of the rift with third-parties, that's possible, though we have yet to see anything to prove it. Splatoon isn't going to be a big game. Neither is Giant Robot Dry Humping Simulator. Nintendo has yet to show us their next big IP. They've yet to show us an array of Nintendo owned IP that will finally provide diversity to their home consoles. They've yet to show us that they can provide the volume of content that the other consoles will offer.

Quite honestly, we probably wouldn't see any of that until their next console, anyway.

Their historical and present pettiness aside, third parties are not the villains per se. They are trying to make their money (though not doing an especially good job of it, really). It also bears digging into some of the coded language we all use here. When we say "third party support" we mean "integrated in the multiplat ecosystem" which is why handhelds, where exclusives still rule, are eliminated from the equation. Similarly, the position I and other Nintendo fans advocate is not "kick all third parties to the curb" as i earlier said, but instead "screw trying to pursue parity." Parity in the multiplat realm is a severe uphill battle, as evidenced by the Wii U, and one that is ultimately fruitless, as Sony and Microsoft are already at the top of that hill and Nintendo would have to exert so much effort to even draw level with them that it is, as i said earlier, a fool's errand. The money and energy that would need to be spent to even buy admission into that arena could be better spent on a lateral-thinking kind of strategy. In this realm you could also pursue third parties, either whole companies or specific projects from the big guys, projects that can't work in the current ecosystem but could work in a third-way environment. That was how third party support (that wasn't party-game shovelware) ultimately worked on the Wii: the Wii was a low-risk environment, but still more stable and capable than Mobile at the time, where B-games could, not flourish necessarily, but make a living for themselves.

I said "eShop", but this solution could take multiple forms. Nintendo should better pursue kid-friendly third party games, which still come out from the West and still make appearances on Wii U, and thus is something they could deal with now. More partnership games like Devil's Third and Bayonetta 2 could work out as well, where you pursue games which would get ignored or lose money trying to compete with the Western AAA blockbusters. More games like No More Heroes, in short.

eShop is a possible way forward in that Nintendo could encourage indies and then, essentially, try to promote promising indies into doing boxed retail titles, or retail-grade titles like The Witness.

So this is a post explaining my earlier, more ornery and less thoughtful reply to Rol.