A thought on "There are no good conventional third party games for the Wii"

[Words Of Wisdom]

HappySqurriel said:

Words Of Wisdom said:

HappySqurriel said:

I see the comment "Third party publishers developers aren’t interested in making high quality conventional videogames for the Wii" and I just wanted to point something out that was missed a couple of weeks ago. Soon after IGN reported on High Voltage’s Conduit, 12 publishers showed immediate interest in publishing the game for them.

Now, although this is not entirely unprecedented, you don’t typically see publishers fighting over a game that is being developed by a team that has never had a blockbuster hit; usually, after an announcement like this the publisher would be listed as TBA for 12 months before they could finally work out a deal with a less than stellar publisher.

Certainly, some of these publishers that approached High Voltage probably were not the best in the industry; but, being that they (seemingly) have the budget available for what could potentially be a fairly large budget game it wouldn’t surprise me that several of these publishers were the big players in the industry.

 

Fixed.

You do realize that developers only get to make the projects that publishers are interested in funding ...

There are a few exceptions, but the number of truely independant developers who can fully fund their own game (in particular a big budget game) is very, very small.

You don't quite understand.  The communications between developers and publishers goes both ways.

Sometimes the publishers acquire a license and approach developers with the proposition of building a game for it.  This tends to happen with movie or other franchise tie-ins.

Sometimes developers will attempt to create a title themselves.  If they can publish it themselves, they will sometimes do so as it means a larger profit.  If they see risk in it, they will approach publishers with it to spread the risk and lower the cost of failure.  The former usually involves a larger more mature developer studio and the latter usually involves either a developer with a lot of high recognition or terrific marketing.  Square Soft would be an example of the former and Bioware (prior to EA acquisition) would be a good example of the latter.

The final scenario is a developer without the funds to publish a game title.  These are the ones truly at the mercy of the publisher as their ability to find a publisher dictates whether or not they can make the game.

 

Now if publishers are literally jumping to get Conduit in their portfolio, it means at very least they see profit in it.  This doesn't necessarily mean that they are otherwise interested in the Wii itself or in developers looking to make games for the Wii.  If we do assume that publishers are jumping at Conduit because it's positioned as a high quality Wii title, that means that they're more than willing to put good titles on the Wii but you aren't seeing many because... you guessed it, developers aren't interest in the Wii.

So either this incident indicates nothing more than publishers can smell profit in the water (which is only logical) or that developers aren't interested in the Wii while publishers are.  Take your pick.