| Bodhesatva said: There isn't much I agree with in here, but I did think this line was valid: "Pachter said, observing that many publishers "don't know what to do with" the new demographics of female and older gamers." This is a problem that I think Nintendo is going to run in to. Third parties may suspect -- or even know -- that there is more money to be made on the Wii than on the 360 or PS3, but they simply will not know how to cash in. They just have no idea what types of games to make. N'gai Croal described this as: "It's possible that 3rd party companies are genetically unequipped to survive in a market where Nintendo is king" (okay, I admit the wording might be slightly off), and to some extent, I think he's right. Nintendo is way ahead of everyone else. Which sounds like an enormous compliment, but to some extent it's not; the DS has been out for 3 years, and thus far no companies have succesfully tapped into the Nintendogs/Brain Age/Big Brain phenomenon. The DS hardware keeps selling and selling, the Nintendo software keeps piling up sales, and yet no one is catching on. |
I think the flawed assumption which many people (including third parties) seem to be making is that developers have to drastically change their approach to cash in on the Wii; I'm not sure if this is actually true. This is essentially the same mistake many people made with the DS even though Nintendo continued to be successful making Mario Kart and The New Super Mario Bros. which don't use the touch screen heavily.
You can make a very good RPG using the Wiimote as a NES controller, and there are tons of games which work well on a Keyboard and Mouse that can translate onto the Wii. If developers focused on making games with good interfaces rather than games with motion control they would be far better off.
Even beyond that it isn't that difficult to tap into the non-gamer market. You will find that many of the people Nintendo has captured are people who play flash games. Go to a flash game site and play dozens of games and I'm certain you will see a ton of interesting game ideas ...
