bardicverse said: picko said: " 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?" -------- What an odd point of view, which very much is the polar opposite of what is actually happening. Much of the crowd buying Wii's are not parents in low income families, but the upper echelon who see it as the "trendy" system, the system that people are impressed they have, the ever elusive Wii. You won't see Muffy and Buffy having company over and after discussing their stock shares, they say "oh, we just got a PS3/XB360. Care to try it?" but you will see these people egging their company to try a game of bowling, etc. Of course, these people likely aren't going out to buy a Resident Evil game, unless they have gamer roots. Yet, back on your statement. Wii development costs a LOT less to make a AAA title than it does for the HD systems, which means a quicker profit point. Combine that with the dominating marketshare for the Wii, and you have a system that you can put a big game on and turn a profit with better success. Publishers like buffers, and the buffer is the market share numbers. To drive the point home the Wii has double the market share of the PS3. This means that even if every PS3 owner buys a copy of a game, it only equates to half of the Wii owners. So in the end, it is less profitable to make a AAA game for the HD consoles. The other issue is competition. Since the HD consoles focus heavily on graphics, there is a higher potential for the gameplay to suffer. THis isn't always true, but some games go so far out of their way to bring a good visual experience, they forget they're making a game. So unless that HD system game is top notch and is well-received, it might get ignored over a better game. On the Wii, as long as the controls are done well and gameplay well done, it's easier to get a game noticed (with proper advertising of course). So the incentive to develop AAA games on the Wii is high, because the game can shine through the lackluster games easily. |
Tell that to Ubisoft and Activision who raked in gobs of money largely because of the sales of their PS3/360 games Assassin's Creed and COD4. Activision also made quite a bit off the PS3/360/Wii/PS2 Guitar Hero III. But even still the PS2 version still sold more than the Wii version, although the Wii version did trounce the PS3 version.
Do you really think they would have made as much money if both of those games hadn't pushed the graphical and technical envelope which convinced even people like me, who generally stray away from FPS's, to buy COD4? I planned to buy Assassin's Creed since its announcement because of its ability to create a dynamic world all rendered in real-time, something the Wii would have to make large sacrifices to do.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson