"Wii Third-Party Struggles Highlighted by May NPD" - GameDaily

[Bodhesatva]

Legend11 said:

Bodhesatva said:

Third parties are in so much trouble. They're struggling to make money on the PS3/360 due to low install base/high development costs, but they've spent the last decade moving away from the market leader, and now are finding it tough to move back on.

Are they really doing any better on the Wii? How many new IPs built from the ground up on the Wii have met with a lot of success? The list is very small and the biggest success for third-parties, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games has Mario in the title.

People can point to budget titles and talk about success all they want but how many such titles would a large third party have ot make in order to get the kind of profits they're used to? The market would be flooded if they attempted to do that.

That's my point; there is no right answer to this. They can't seem to break in on the Wii, but the systems they do know how to sell games on -- the Playstation and Xbox -- are both struggling with low WW install bases and have very high development costs.

I'm sure some will relegate the Wii to purely small, expiremental titles to pad the risks of higher budget endeavors on the higher powered platforms. In addition, some companies have shown outright hostility to the Wii; Mark Rein at Epic is a great example. His company makes games that (party or largely) rely on technology to sell, in addition to selling tech itself (the UE3 Engine). Therefore, a system like the Wii, which challenges the relevance of technological power in gaming, threatens Epic's entire business model.

So it's possible that changing corporate philosophy so drastically isn't a reasonable or efficient move. On the other hand, Legend, Nintendo is making more money than the entire rest of the industry combined and doubled, and it's fairly clear that the Wii will end with 50%-ish share of the market. If Nintendo is given free reign over half the industry while every other video game company fights over the other, much less profitable half, there will be disastrous consequences. So that's why I said third parties are screwed; it's got to be frustrating to beat your head against the Nintendo juggernaught, but you also can't simply cede 3/4 of all the profits in the entire industry to Nintendo.