Mike_L said:
1: I've heard all of that about bad ports so many times now. The 3rd party ports I've tried on my Wii U have been fine. Personally, I believe it has more to do with the tastes of the majority of Nintendo console demographics. I don't believe 3rd parties are biased and only release bad ports on Nintendo consoles. 2: That most Western 3rd parties are developing many "mature" titles (which mostly don't sell great on Nintendo consoles) doesn't make them biased against Nintendo. It's just happens to be where they've found their market and way of earning money. You could argue that it isn't fair to expect Nintendo to help improve that "mature" market for them but don't call 3rd parties biased when they offer stronger support elsewhere where manufacturers actually go the extra mile in order to create platforms where 3rd parties thrive. Sony and Microsoft are sucking up to 3rd parties to the point where it sometimes actually conflicts with their own financial short term interests. Fair enough if you don't want Nintendo to do that but then don't complain about weaker support in the same breath. See my 2nd comment to Rol above. 3: You're saying that especially "non-mature" 3rd party titles couldn't compete with Nintendo? Very few of the top 15 selling 3rd party titles on Wii were "mature". 1. Just Dance 4: As you mention GoldenEye 007, No More Heroes, Sonic Unleashed and LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga all did great on Wii but at the same time they're all actually proof that 3rd parties will indeed support Nintendo if their games are selling well on their consoles. GoldenEye 007 - All the following Activision shooters were on Nintendo consoles (007 Legends + COD: Black Ops + COD: Modern Warfare 3 + COD: Black Ops 2 + COD: Ghosts). 5: You criticize 3rd parties for not putting games like Resident Evil 5 and COD: Modern Warfare 2 on Wii in spite of the Wii being the market leader. I believe this was purely based on the Wii's weaker hardware specs. You don't want bad ports. Well, I think RE5 and MW2 would've run pretty bad on Wii's hardware. Additionally, in point 3 I listed the top 15 best selling 3rd party Wii games and there's not a single game like RE5 or MW2. Besides, MW2 was in development before GoldenEye 007 showed Activision that Wii had a market for shooters. 6: You can't just force motion controls into all those never attempted games you speak of. You could argue that the Wii had a "classic" controller but then the argument about biggest install base wouldn't be valid. Again, those big franchises wouldn't necessarily be big successes on Wii (see point 3). 7: I don't believe in this conspiracy and 3rd party bias against Nintendo. If there's money to be made, they'll come. 8: As I wrote to Rol: The monkey that went over to the bucket full of fruits instead of the empty one wasn't prejudiced. It was just acting as a rational thinking creature and chose the option where it got rewarded (also see point 2). |
1. Can you name a specific example of a port that wasn't either poorly done, released more than 3 months late, or otherwise handicapped going in (like Rayman Legends with the massive, cynical public delay, or Black Ops 2 with it blatant that it wouldn't get support post-launch)? I don't care about what you "believe", I care about facts.
2. Mature titles sell fine on Nintendo consoles, when they're well-made. On the Wii, you had titles such as Call of Duty 3, Resident Evil 4 (and Umbrella Chronicles), Goldeneye, No More Heroes, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Monster Hunter Tri all demonstrate that (in the case of NMH, it's relative to typical Suda51, and comparison with PS3/360 version sales), as do Metroid Prime 3, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword. Can you name a "mature" title that was released on the Wii, that wasn't low quality or otherwise handicapped, that didn't sell at least decently-well?
3. I addressed the "casual game" case in the previous paragraph: "When they had a big casual hit, such as Just Dance or Carnival Games, they started pumping more and more of them out with lower quality and less value, to pump as much out of it before it died, rather than trying to cultivate a long-term audience. And if a casual title didn't sell huge numbers, they simply cut and ran." Casual titles work differently. But more than that, you're actually making my point for me. Third parties frequently LITERALLY said that it's hard to compete against Nintendo... but when they actually tried, they didn't have any trouble. Remember, I'm not describing the ACTUAL situation in that paragraph, I'm describing third party attitudes.
4. I listed four examples. They demonstrate that Nintendo has a broad and open market. And you think that proves me wrong? These games sold well BECAUSE the developer and publisher put in the effort. Did they put in the effort with Dead Space? Nope. Did they put in the effort with Grand Theft Auto? Nope, didn't even put it on the system. Final Fantasy? Nope. Call of Duty? Nope (publisher-specific, here - I have no qualms with Treyarch). Assassin's Creed? Nope. The Batman Arkham games? Nope. Any EA sports title except the Tiger Woods ones (which were never big-sellers)? Nope. Battlefield? Mass Effect? Far Cry? Crysis? Street Fighter? Mortal Kombat? BioShock? None of them. Shall I continue?
As for the examples themselves. Activision did put all of their shooters on the Wii following... except that nothing changed. They continued to be lacking in features (not talking about stuff the Wii couldn't handle, but stuff the Wii was completely capable of handling), unsupported after release, with no attention given to the Wii version prior to release either. Suda 51, I have no qualms with - understand, I'm not making sweeping "every developer does it" statements, I'm talking about the major publishers (Suda 51 tends to work with Marvelous, who have been quite good, and can't really be called a "major publisher") - incidentally, The Silver Case was never released for DS, and it was just a port of a 1999 game.
Sonic has almost always had a place on Nintendo consoles - it's undoubtedly a special case. Sonic Lost World and Sonic Boom were from a Nintendo/Sega deal, though, so you really can't count those. And notice that they're all the spinoff Sonic titles; the "real" ones - Sonic Generations and Sonic 4 - didn't really get proper representation, with Sonic Generations skipping the Wii and Sonic 4 Episode 2 never making it to any Nintendo system.
TT Games, I have no problems at all with - they've been fine, have given proper support to Nintendo systems, and put real effort into every release. The LEGO games have been on-point, as they say nowadays.
5. "Bad ports" aren't about the quality of the graphics. They're about glitchiness, missing features that aren't particularly hard to implement, and more generally inferior quality of game. Would Resident Evil 5 on Wii have looked as good as it would on the other systems? No. But other than the graphical downgrade, is there anything in the game that would fail to work on the Wii? Not that I've seen, at least.
Modern Warfare 2 is a different situation entirely - it was missed because Infinity Ward didn't want to make their games for Wii, so Treyarch had to argue with Activision for the opportunity to port the IW games to Wii. They ported Modern Warfare 1 two years late (because World at War proved that there was at least some market), and despite not really getting much support from Activision, they managed to make a decent game with more features than were found in World at War. As I've said, I have no problem with Treyarch; Infinity Ward and Activision are to blame for the state of CoD on Nintendo systems. But MW2 didn't get missed because it would be a "downgrade", it got missed because they skipped MW1 originally, and they were basically trying to catch up. By MW3, they realised they were better off porting the current game, and so MW2 never happened.
World at War proved a market for shooters well before Goldeneye. Call of Duty 3 proved it even earlier - sold almost as much as the 360 version, and more than the PS3 version, despite lacking online entirely (another thing I don't blame anybody for - online wasn't fully prepared on Wii until a few months after CoD3 released).
Not sure what your point is regarding the "top 15" part, but let me ask you think - can you think of a Wii FPS title that wasn't gimped in terms of functionality, and that sold well on other systems? Goldeneye proved that Wii FPS titles can do well, but where was the follow-up attempt to make a Wii FPS? The closest is The Conduit, and while High Voltage Software were skilled at making a game engine, they sucked at game design.
6. Who said anything about forcing motion controls? Many genres have no need for such things on Wii, with Wiimote+Nunchuk buttons being more than sufficient. Others would have explicitly benefited from the Wii's controls. Where was the big turn-based RPG series? The RTS or Tactical RPG series? These would have used motion controls perfectly. Where were the big Survival Horror titles, considering that Resident Evil 4 did quite well and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was the best-selling Silent Hill title of the generation (for one platform)? Every other survival horror title was either Nintendo-published (Fatal Frame), actually an on-rails shooter (RE Chronicles games, Dead Space, House of the Dead), completely missing the point of the original (Dead Rising), or published by a minor publisher (Cursed Mountain).
Something to think about - the Wii got both a Soulcalibur game and a Castlevania game. The Soulcalibur game was an adventure title and the Castlevania game was a fighter. Both franchises got normal titles on the other systems, and neither one got a game from their normal genre on the Wii. What does this tell us?
7. I'm not asserting a conspiracy. That implies organised intent. I'm suggesting the exact same kind of human behaviour that saw Square Enix refuse to work with Nintendo in the N64 era due to policies that were, by that time, defunct. I'm suggesting the exact same kind of behaviour that saw EA stop development on the Wii U before they had any real idea of how well it would sell, with just about everyone identifying it as a "falling out" - to such an extent that EA refused to allow a practically-finished Crysis 3 (according to the developers) to be released on the Wii U because there was "a lack of business support" from EA.
And again, I don't care what you "believe". And again, you can't use the "if there's money" argument - Crysis 3 could have been released on the eShop for nearly nothing; EA still wouldn't allow it. There have been other titles, along the way, that have been cancelled at the last minute for Nintendo systems. And "money" doesn't counteract any of my other points, which you have conveniently left off your summary of my post.
8. Monkeys aren't businesses, and a closer analogy would be the monkey going to the basket that they can SEE fruit in rather than a closed basket that might have more fruit... and refusing to ever go over to the closed basket because there's no current evidence that it contains fruit.
