Picko said:
This has an element of truth to it. Game developers want to make the best games possible and the only perceived strength of the Wii is its controller and it remains unclear as to whether that truly offers a superior game experience across the board. The other reason why the Wii does not receive quality third party software is incentives. There is little incentive for developers to make quality software on the Wii. Whilst it would be difficult to get numbers on this I would imagine that Wii gamers are inelastic to game budget (with budget as a proxy for quality), that is you can make cheap games without losing a significant amount of sales and you don't gain a significant amount of sales by increasing budget. Therefore why spend more on a game? You'd be better off making a cheap game and using whatever left over funds on another game. Hence, Wii development encourages lower budget games and lower budget game are highly correlated with lower quality games, therefore Wii gamers get lower quality experiences. On the 360 and PS3 you cannot really do this. Gamers on this console appear more likely to be quality elastic and therefore as a developer drops quality they lose a significant amount of sales. As a result there is little incentive to release low quality software on these consoles. Quite simply its a matter of economic incentives. Wii fans may now hate Ubisoft but I can assure you that there would be method to their madness (although announcing it is not something I would do), there would be economic models running and analysis taking place and the belief is that there is greater returns to be made making low quality, low budget games that sell reasonally well or not that great than there is making high budget fare that does not necessarily do that much better in sales. It is unfortunately, a sad truth that Wii owners will have to get used to and the thing is that it is unlikely to change as there's no reason for the incentives to change. I am sure they will say that I'm wrong and come up with plenty of reasons why I could be but companies react to economic incentives and the economic incentives with regards to the Wii is to make cheap, low budget games. |
But you don't have evidence for that. You just used bigger sentences to state something unproven. There is no incentive to make the cheapest Wii games possible, except for Ubisoft being cheap when it comes to the Wii.
Oh, and there is an incentive to make big budget games for the Wii: a big budget game from Ubisoft themselves was a hit game. So what if it was a launch title? Is there a glut of high quality FPS on the Wii since then? There isn't, so if Ubisoft made Red Steel 2, even if the spent less money on it, with tighter controls, and more satisfying gameplay, and marketed it (because Ubisoft admitted even casual games need marketing to sell), it would have just as much chance of being a hit as an HD game.
They just don't want to bother. The audience is there (you think Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 sold solely because of Nintendo fanboys?), they just don't want to see it.
A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.
Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs