Nintendo Enthusiats: No Mr. Adelman, You’re Wrong About Nintendo’s Third-Party Situation

[NightDragon83]

zorg1000 said:

NightDragon83 said:

Not true at all.  Street Fighter II alone probably moved as many consoles in the early days of the SNES as Super Mario World did, and was instrumental in allowing the SNES to catch up to the Genesis which already had a 2 year head start in the west.  Third parties like Square / Enix, Konami and Capcom played a huge role in the NES's and SNES's popularity and success as well.

The N64 also had its share of 3rd party best sellers like the Turok series, Tony Hawk, the WCW / WWF games, and the LucasArts / Factor 5 Star Wars games.  Hell, even the GC had a decent amount of million-seller 3rd party titles.

Then the Wii happened, which became the Just Dance / Guitar Hero and party / minigame machine for 3rd parties.  And now the Wii U can't even get that part right, so its no wonder 3rd party developers have all but abandoned Nintendo.

They are talking about multiplats, not 3rd parties in general. Most of those titles u listed were exclusive to Nintendo so that proves their point, multiplats have never been a driving force for Nintendo.

Street Fighter II was on SNES for about 2 years before Genesis got a version of it, also games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc didn't sell NES/SNES because they were third party games, it was because they were high-quality games that couldn't be found elsewhere. Same goes for the N64 third party games, Turok, Star Wars, wrestling/sports/racing games that sold well were mostly exclusive, the only really strong selling multiplat was Tony Hawk.

It's the same reason PS1 was able to steal so much of Nintendo's market, it wasn't because it had third parties, it was because it had more and bigger exclusives, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tekken, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon were on PS1 but not N64.

Even most of the big system selling PS2 games were exclusive, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, God of War. PS2 did have alot of strong selling multiplats but it was because they had already built up a huge lead over the competitors.

The HD twins in the 7th were really the first time that multiplats have been the driving force of sales for consoles.

I was responding to Slarvax's comment that stated  "I'm very sure every other Nintendo console had very low selling 3rd party games (except SNES, but those didn't move the hardware numbers anyway)."   This is just simply not true as I noted in my post.

As for the difference between 3rd party multiplats and exclusives, that's a moot point in the NES's case because nearly all 3rd party games were defacto exclusives as per Nintendo's strict licensing agreements.  And how can you say that my comment proves their point that "multiplats were never a driving force for Nintendo" (a completely new argument that I was not responding to) when the SNES shared plenty of 3rd party multiplats with the Genesis that sold well and helped move consoles on both sides?  Games like the MK series, Earthworm Jim, The Lion King, the NFL/NHL games, NBA Jam, Toy Story, the later editions of Street Fighter II like Super SF2 etc.

It wasn't until the PS1/N64 generation that Nintendo lost out on alot of 3rd party exclusive titles to its rivals, but the N64 still had a decent amount of both 3rd party exclusives and mutiplats, as did the GameCube, minus some of the big name exclusives of course.  But the point being that back in the day, multiplatform or exclusive, 3rd party titles helped sell Nintendo consoles.

After the GameCube the notion that "only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo consoles" became a thing because Nintendo's userbase on consoles had eroded for greener pastures, and Niintendo hasn't done anything in 2 generations and counting now to try and woo them back.  Niche titles like Bayonetta 2 (which wouldn't even exist if they didn't fund it) aren't going to convince the gamers who left Nintendo during the PS1/2 days and who continued on to PS360 and now PSOne to come back to Nintendo.