Why so much negative attitude this gen ?

[greenmedic88]

Words Of Wisdom said:

greenmedic88 said:
So the claim would be, failure to properly market third party releases are what's responsible for their relatively low sales performances? Compared to quality or at least heavily marketed Nintendo titles.

Maybe in regards to some of the quality titles like Okami, Zack & Wiki or No More Heroes, but I'm really not convinced a handful of TV spots would have suddenly catapulted any of those titles into multi-million sellers. Clearly the quality was there.

How many good quality third party games (even original IPs) will have to be released on the platform before publishers start seeing the payoffs one would expect of developing for a "lead" platform?

One could make the claim as you describe however would likely couldn't prove it in the way you'd believe. Consider No More Heroes for example. Now, let's say Suda51 launched a multimillion dollar ad-campaign (let's pretend they had the money for that) which resulted in: giant cardboard standouts in major retailers, television commercials during prime time, magazine and viral ads galore, and much much more.

Given those, do you believe that the game would still have sold the same amount we see now? I doubt anyone here would realistically make such a claim. Advertising would have driven sales. How much we don't know however. Better marketing would have definitely helped however in many cases due to other factors, it was simply not possible.

I would also challenge your definition of "payoffs." Do you think Suda51 is in the poor house now or that they lost money on No More Heroes? Did the game make them rich? No. Did the game meet some reasonable expectations? Quite likely it did. There was a payoff there but it was less than I'm sure the developer had hoped for.

His games appeal to a very limited audience for starters. It would not be the best move financially to spend millions on a marketing campaign for an M rated game for the Wii. If they had, it could have ended up losing money in the long run. 

NMH was far more accessible than Killer 7, but even so, it was never intended as a mass market game.

It should have done well enough to ensure we will be seeing another unique game from Suda although it probably won't be another NMH title. Personally, Suda was not happy with the game's reception on the Wii.

http://spong.com/article/14611/Wii_Games_Not_Selling_says_Killer-7_Creator?cb=450 

Zack and Wiki would have been a better example for you to use. That game should have been accessible enough to a large portion of the Wii audience, but it was a sleeper that I'm guessing did not cost Capcom a huge amount to produce.

Tack on extensive marketing campaign costs, and suddenly the investment by the publisher has increased by a sizeable percentage. Do you know if such a campaign would have yielded higher overall profits? Because I'm guessing the accountants at Capcom didn't believe this, and the company heads didn't want to take the additional risk.  

But if you have some sort of hard line of reasoning that says otherwise, maybe you should write a letter to Capcom to convince them.