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wombat123 on 11 May 2016
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Soundwave said:

Demographics likely play a major part too. Lets be honest, Nintendo doesn't really appeal to the "jock audience". Generally speaking most third party major titles are either A) Violent action games or B) sports/driving simulator. Oh and then you have wacky Japanese action game with girl with giant tits that will have to be censored in the US market causing the 250 people who were planning to buy it to rage out.

But that's kind of a microcosm of the market. Truth be told even in the Super NES days, EA's sports games while they did sell well on the SNES (so did things like NBA Jam) still sold better on the Sega Genesis.

Nintendo isn't "cool" in that way, so they struggle with these types of third party games because they don't attract the audience that buys them.

N64 was probably the last Nintendo system that really had some foothold of appeal to this type of gamer, but this is now almost 20 years ago since GoldenEye (!) and since then Nintendo has probably regressed backwards as a brand to this audience. Gone are things like Perfect Dark, Eternal Darkness, NBA/MLB games, Star Wars games, etc. and as wonderful as Splatoon is, it's not exactly making up for that style of game.

*Maybe* as such Nintendo should perhaps offer to pay for the porting costs of EA titles for the first year or two. Even though EA is far from perfect being completely shut out of the NFL, FIFA, and Star Wars licenses are fairly damaging and plus it will likely cause other big Western developers to back off from providing major support as well.

Nintendo really screwed up by not giving the Gamecube any real online capabilities.  They essentially abandoned the audience Rare and other western 3rd parties built on the N64 and just handed them over to Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Sony) without a fight.

I also agree that Nintendo should chip in on some of the porting/publishing/advertising costs for some of the big western 3rd party titles until Nintendo can prove that there's a viable audience for their games on the NX or until Nintendo just gives up on western 3rd parties.  And I think that's going to be the biggest thing that Nintendo has to prove with the NX (if they want consistent support from western 3rd parties); that western 3rd party games can sell decently enough on it to make it worth their time because as far as I can remember, except for the N64, Nintendo's core fans have largely only cared about Nintendo games and Japanese 3rd party games.

Honestly, If  Nintendo is really serious about getting western 3rd parties back on board then they need to suck it up and try to create a couple of new, marquee 1st party franchises that can be used as entry titles for people to get warmed up to the types of games that western 3rd parties make.  Microsoft has them with franchises like Halo and Gears of War.  Sony has them with Naughty Dog games, Killzone and others.  What does Nintendo have?  Metroid (specifically the Prime series) -- a franchise that they're doing nothing substantial with.