| Ail said: Except you can't sustain the maths of 1 Wii games leading to 4 Wii games and so on without saturating the market and then those games start selling a lot less due to saturation.... The gaming market is not so different from the movie market, each year there is only room for so many blockbusters.... And you don't want to release your blockbuster at the same time as the competition, in the same way you don't want to make a blockbuster very similar to the one the competition is making... That's one issue for big budgets games on the Wii right now. Developers have zero visibility on what is coming, especially from Nintendo, the dominant player on the market. Do you want to take the risk of developing a big costly RPG game and then have Nintendo announce the new Zelda or another RPG game coming out at the time your game was planned ? That's a costly risk that could force you to delay your game release by as much as 6 months and greatly affect the financial results for that year... The nice thing about HD consoles right now is that both Sony and MSFT have provided very good visibility on their future plans and you can position yourself around that ( anyone knows it would be suicide to release a big budget Racing game on the PS3 around the first half of 2009 with GT5 coming out.. The same way people knew that releasing a mega budget PS3 game in Q2 this year was a bad idea with GTA4 and MGS4 already planned for that date..)
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The movie industry differs dramatically from the game industry in many ways, but the most obvious is the TTL (time to live). A movie generally is out of the movie theaters within a month these days, unless it is a bigger title, and then it might last 2 months. A game will sit on shelves for about 4-6 months, sometimes longer, and even after it is off the shelves, it is still available online. There is a much greater urgency for movies to get noticed and make a lot of noise right away. With games, GTA4 and Mario Kart can come out at the same time and if a person has both systems (and the money) will get them both. I often buy games in bulk, meaning instead of 1 game, I get 2-4 games at once and they just sit and wait their turn to be played.... which reminds me I still have Alien Syndrome in shrinkwrap.
Ultimately, people buy games based on reviews or reccomendations, so as long as a game shines through the mediocre stuff, it will still get noticed and purchased. I do understand your point, and it does hold true in the sense of the gamer on a budget, or if choosing a Christmas gift for someone else. Yet, there are still enough gamers out there to meet the numbers I mentioned in my earlier post.
