| RolStoppable said: You don't understand it, because you haven't played the games that third parties have passed off as good. You wouldn't have been fond of those games either. Not because you don't like that type of game, but because the lack of quality is so appalling. I don't think your way of determining who is casual works, because then you would have to make the same claim for the PSP. And this is before we get into the issue that the word "casual" has no clear definition and means different things to different people; although most commonly it's used in the context of something that is not welcome. The DS has the highest tie ratio of any handheld ever, but that's besides the point. You don't judge developer interest that way, but rather by the overall number of titles that were released for a system and the quality of said titles; and both the DS and PSP had a healthy amount of legitimately good third party games, most notably in the JRPG genre. Equally nonsensical is a breakdown of the top 20 bestselling games; you should realize that that doesn't make sense, because the DS got better third party support despite being more skewed than the Wii in said top 20 breakdown. |
Regardless of my or your definition of casual; the fact of the matter is that, like I said, about 80% of the Wii's installed base will have vanished from the console market, which in turn denotes that these are customers that were never very invested in gaming to begin with, it is perfectly reasonable then to assume that these same customers would in fact not have purchased much 3rd party AAA software. The console market has been steadily growing for almost three decades; suddenly a huge chunk of it disappears, effectively setting the total hardware numbers for home consoles back to around the same level as the 6th generation, it doesn't take a genius like the two of us to figure out that something rather unusual has taken place here and this largely invalidates the dated, baseless claim that 3rd party games ever had the potential to do very well on the Wii.
As for the term casual covering something that is "not welcome" or not; this is irrelevant since you still have to somehow explain what happened to those 80 million + gamers who up and disappeared, this is not a matter of semantics, it is a matter of observable facts and the notion that these gamers would somehow have been a proper source of income for 3rd parties is mere speculation at best and utter hogwash at worst.
The DS has had about 1300-1500 titles released, depending on sources, in comparison, the PS2 had over 3500 on the same installed base and had about twice the total software sales. The PSP had about 800 titles released and sold around 300 million units of software, a fair bit less than half of the DS, in comparison, the 360 has about 1100-1200 games released and has sold about 950 units of software (on an installed base only slightly bigger than the PSP). These handhelds clearly have less titles than their home console counterparts/peers and sell way less software.
One could argue that the Wii was the DS' peer as well, of course, but that doesn't change much since the Wii had more titles released and twice as many scoring in the 90's or higher than the DS (for the sake of your own argument, that is, going by your metric of; number of releases + quality = level of support).
There are about 450 games that scored 90 or more on Metacritic, out of these, there are only two on the PSP out of about 800 releases. The DS has only 7 titles rated 90 or above, and 5 of these are Nintendo games and there are around 1300 releases (on a 155 million installed base) so there goes the whole theory on broad 3rd party support and subsequent high quality to measure support you mentioned. Also; in comparison, the 360 has 54 titles rater 90 or higher, the PS3 has 52 titles rated 90 or higher, the PS2 had 58 games rated 90 or higher and the Wii had 14 titles rated 90 or over and out of those, 8 were Nintendo games, similar to the PSP and DS situation, it has around 1350 titles released in total.
One should also note, as I mentioned earlier, that the Wii's total software sales are over 1/3 1st party titles.
The Xbox One currently already has 3 titles scoring 90 or more, out of less than 300 released titles, the PS4 has 8 titles scoring 90 or more, already beyond the DS then after only about 1.5 years on the market and about 400 releases thus far, 3 of those titles are 1st party developer or published.
You see; you just had you own argument defeated by your own metric of support. By number of titles and the quality of them; it can be claimed using your logic that the Wii had better support than the DS then; it has more releases than the 360 (about 150-200 more) and twice as many games scoring higher than 90 than the DS does so it must have better 3rd party support. This doesn't work no matter how you twist it. It is simply not that cut & dry, and 1st party percentage of total software sales is highly relevant when one is discussing 3rd party support; if the majority of your top selling and top rated titles are 1st party, 3rd parties have obviously not had a huge commercial and critical impact on your overall software situation and this shows that the DS, PSP and Wii all had pretty poor support all in all.
PS: You also failed to adress the hardware issue; what would be the developer incentive to work at making better Wii ports when the hardware chasm was so vast? Different generation shaders, different processor threading (and single core at that, with a lot less buffer and 64 bit vs 32 bit), much less memory, no proper harddrive for installs, no way of running high tier post-processing effects or modern light and shadow rendering etc. That's a lot of obstacles, and with no discernable rewards to doing said work; it takes a special kind of person to still be pondering why they didn't bother with this, especially when the other two were so adept as selling traditional 3rd party software. Many Nintendo fans then pull the "look at all the developers that went bust in the 7th gen, this could have been avoided if they supported Nintendo", conveniently forgetting that: A: there was never guarantee of decent sales, that is merely speculation at best, and B: there was a huge financial crisis and it's a small miracle that it went as well as it did, last point C: this has happened before, namely the transition to VGA/SVGA and the rise of the CD-ROM that carried things like FMV and vastly more complex code and textures, which upped development budgets and caused many to go out of business.
I still think, after all these years, that you are being unreasonable regarding the 7th gen and your whole stance on 3rd parties, in spite of all your insights and obvious intelligence; this is something you just cannot seem to let go.
