| RolStoppable said: It's more like the hate is caused by delusions that feed off of an inherit bias against Nintendo. If we pick your post apart, you are already wrong on the premise. You claim that the Wii's goal was to make shovelware dominant, yet Nintendo put out one quality title after another. Therefore establishing low quality gaming couldn't be the goal because the console manufacturer's actions went into the opposite direction. What goes hand in hand with your aforementioned statement is the claim that the Wii almost succeeded in making gaming low quality, but such a claim is inexcuseable on a website that deals with sales. It's easy to look up the list of bestsellers and verify that it's dominated by Nintendo, so shovelware wasn't even close to succeeding. In fact, shovelware sold increasingly less over time which led to third parties abandoning the platform. That brings me to the third point, which is that the companies who were responsible for the shovelware (third parties) not only get a pass, but usually get defended for making those games. Somehow the blame for games that suck butt is passed on to Nintendo and that's something that can only happen when an individual already has an inherit bias against Nintendo to begin with and thus is looking hard for any possible reason to reinforce and justify said bias. |
Of course, Nintendo didn't intended to make shovelware dominant. But they do intented to make the casual market the dominant force in the industry and to change the gaming world to motion control schemes. That combination made it harder to create some genres of games for the Wii and it was just more interesting to 3rd parties to create games that were projected to motion controls, mainly party games and mini games collections.
Succeding to get the casuals on board forever (supposing that smartphones never existed this could happen), core gamers would be outnumbered. And the 3rd parties would make games focused on the bigger audience: dancing games, party games, fitness games, they would be the dominant force. Cheaper to make and would sell better. Why would I make a US$ 100M shooter if I could get 4 times more sales with a US$ 10M party game? Nintendo didn't intended to make a shovelware festival, but they did achieved an enviroment where shovelware could prevail. Looking at the mobile gaming scene, we can have a good idea of what a casual dominated gaming scene looks like. More complex games, like shooter, have hundreds of times less downloads than simpler, casual games.
It's a similar situation to Atari. They weren't pushing the 2600 as a machine for buggy unfinished games, porn titles and low quality games in general. But they did put an iron claw on games (publishing all of them) and didn't paid a dime to the developers. So we had guys making alone games that would sell 5M units and just getting US$ 10k for it. It was an enviroment that estimulated developer to jump ship and work by themselves, creating Activision. So they sued Atari and won the right to publish any game, a right that was exploited by all other developers to put games there without any interference from Atari. That led to massive damages to the console's image and indirectly created the crash. Atari didn't intended to, but they created the right enviroment for it to happen.
My point is that Nintendos pov is that their games are all that matter. 3rd parties are an extra. So their politics are always focused in what is best for them and they aren't worried with the results it will have on 3rd parties.
And just to finish, my claim of low quality is backed by sales. The top may be occupied by Nintendo titles, but the Wii sold almost 1B in software. Going down that list, we have a lot of shovelware and movie/cartoon tie-ins with millions in sales.
