Picko said:
You missed in the entire point of my post. None of your post addresses it. The crux of my argument was this: Wii owners appear be demand inelastic (less responsive) to changes in the quality of a game. That is you can decrease quality without losing a significant amount of copies sold. Therefore it is profitable to decrease quality to some point where the costs equal the benefits of doing so. This position appears to be lower than it is for 360 and PS3 owners, therefore on average you can expect lower quality games. More to the point developers appear to know this. That analysis far better fits the facts of what Ubisoft and other developers are doing. In fact it fits the facts rather perfectly, which isn't all that surprising given that it's a rational reaction to the incentives of the marketplace. To believe otherwise, you have sit there and try to justify why companies would deliberately forego profitable opportunities and whilst some companies are undoubtedly poorly run the Wii's poor third party situation is practically universal so something other than stupidity is taking place and there is a strong possibility that the previous paragraph explains what it is. |
I'd argue, but I notice you didn't really clarify what you meant by decreasing quality. You can't mean making the game worse. That is slapping subjective opinion on objective sales. Do you mean budget and effort? That is likely what you meant, but it's still false.
Table Tennis is a good examples. The budget and effort was severly reduced, and the game sold about 1/7 of the 360 version. That is a significant amount of copies sold being lost.
Or contrast with the million sellers, the actual hits. The closest that even comes close to shovelware is Wii Play or Carnival Games. Two games out of 25. The next closest is Lego Star Wars, but only because it's basically two completed games. Yet those games themselves weren't shovelware.
So your main point seems to be that Ubisoft can and should do this because shovelware sells on the Wii, yet when I look at sales charts I don't see that. I see games with effort selling more, even if those games don't please reviewers.
So I think your argument is faulty, because it's based on a false premise.
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