LordTheNightKnight said:
Picko said:
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?"
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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.
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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. |
I'm not sure whether I ever used the word shovelware, well actually I'm very sure I didn't use it because I used it for the first time ever in this very sentence. Reviews in the aggregate effectively become a reasonably objective measure of quality, otherwise you can simply use budget which is highly correlated with high production values which translates into a quality game almost always. Either way it is not a particularly important point.
There are however plenty of low budget games that have sold extremely well on the Wii. You should have a look for them.
There is however, clear evidence that low budget games can be very lucrative for developers on the Wii. More to the point, a number of very successful Wii games have relatively low production values. Therefore, there seems to be evidence that Wii owners care less about the quality of the software relative to owners of other consoles, and therefore there is lower incentives for developers to make quality software and thus they don't. Game developers simply have a reduced incentive to work as hard on games on the Wii than they do on other consoles, which is reflected in the sense that they don't work as hard on Wii games - and that is surely not a contestable point.
At the end of the day, my theory starts with the hypothesis that developers are rationally responding to market incentives, whereas everyone else is out there loosely referring to conspiracy theories and assuming companies must be insane. Conspiracy theories are a highly unlikely event and if possible the mass insanity of game developers is even less likely (in fact its absurd). The answer has to lie with there being screwed up incentives for Wii developers and this is likely to be the case whether Wii gamers wish to believe it or not. Just don't expect there to be a huge increase in the quality of third party developed games any time soon, you'll just end up disappointed.
But I'm largely over debating the point, afterall it appears clear that Wii owners here would rather simply whinge than try to understand anything that is going on in the marketplace.
