| Bodhesatva said: This, Tenchu 4, Mad World, Fatal Frame 4. I'll tentatively state that Japanese developers appear to be getting on board the Wii now. Western developers? Well... EA did recently announce that they were increasing the quality and quantity of their sports franchises on the Wii (NCAA Football and NBA Live will be appearing on a Nintendo console for the first time in 4 years; all games are built from the ground up on the Wii with considerably more features than last year). Other than that, not much. I still believe the Western Developer problem is twofold: Publishers and Developers. Publishers are still afraid of Nintendo first party and are not entirely sure how to market to this new demographic (when you've been marketing to 10-26 year old males for two decades straight, any shift is hard to make). Western developers have fairly consistently relied on top end hardware to fuel games, as a large portion of them started on PC, and equate better hardware with better games. With recent comments from Rockstar ("fuck casual gaming") and Infinity Ward ("CoD4 wouldn't be a right fit for the Wii"), I think it's fairly clear that a lot of Western devleopers simply do not want to work on the Wii, and will fight to work on the PC, 360, PS3, or some combination thereof. |
I don't want to derail the thread, so I'll limit my comments on this matter to this one (relatively) short post. I actually think the situation with Western developers is nowhere near as dire as it initially seems. I won't get into a list, since those are too inelegant, but looking at where Western support was at the Wii's debut, and where it stands now, I would actually argue that the West is stepping up pretty rapidly.
With the exception of Ubisoft, I can't think of any Western developer who hasn't increased support for the console since launch, and the contrast between what Western companies are doing for the Wii as compared to their output on the Gamecube is stunning. The Wii is getting ports of a lot of major third-party games, which is something I wouldn't have foreseen earlier. It's also getting quite a bit of exclusive games from the West. I'll admit that Japan's hopped on board sooner, but the tea leaves I've examined also tell me the West isn't all that far behind.
And back on topic: does anyone know when this is coming out in the U.S.? I enjoyed the DS version quite a bit, and I'm a Harvest Moon devotee, so I'm really looking forward to this.
