| Mr Khan said: ... 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. |
much better written. xD
..but i think mutltiplat parity ought not be that hard to achieve. all these cross gen titles just go to prove that these days third parties would prefer to put it onto every viable platform they can and nintendo could be a part of that if they were a bit more committed to listening to third parties and making sure their platform has parity with playstation and xbox where it counts. so long as a port to a nintendo console is cheap and easy it will happen imo.
with nintendo's next console they need to prioritize developers over power consumption and backwards compatibility. they need to prioritize open dialog with developers over the desire to "surprise" consumers. they need to make sure their API looks as exactly like PC as possible for easy portability. they need to ensure they online infrastructure supports all the features developers have come to expect as a standard part of the platform these days like game chat.
and finally,. they need to consider that if their console puts a big marketing focus on a controller "gimmick" that consumers will expect games to use it. they need to consider how that will effect muliplat developers that don't want to make console specific features and ensure there is a path for these developers check the box of "supported" without any sigificant investment in development.
