| bdbdbd said: Actually the poorly documented tools and features did not hurt PS2 and I don't think it hurt PS3 to the extent you seem to suggest. PS3 had great 3rd party support out of the gate, it just dried up after the system and it's games did not sell. If Sony had consulted the developers, it had delayed the system if Sony had wanted all PS3 controllers to include motion controls, as Sony clearly had no idea how to use the tech as they could not just copy the Wii Remote as a PS-mote and piss all the devs and publishers who would have needed to build completely different controls to their games. It took time for Sony to learn how they wanted the controls to be used and make the required tools to make the controls work. |
Sure, the PS3 on paper, started with great support. But as you said, once the realities of Cell and its difficulties became clear, the 360 quickly took over as the third party home console of choice. The PS3 often got games late, got games somehow looking and running worse than the 360 with missing features and DLC, or just missed games entirely, with some being straight up 360/PC exclusives. They were able to get away with poor documentation in the PS2 days because there really wasn't much competition, they dominated that gen. But with the 360 having a year's headstart, along with Nintendo offering a unique and more affordable alternative, developers had more home console options than PlayStation.
This situation forced Sony to throw all its weight behind its own first party titles to cover up the mediocre third party support, and combined with better development tools and communication to third parties, slowly recover the console's reputation among developers. It's safe to say it paid off, as the PS3 ended up as a fantastic system with great exclusives and vastly improved third party ports, but it took a while for Sony to clean up that mess.
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bdbdbd said: Well, Wii U was graphically on par with PS360, so it did not offer anything new. This was a year before the PS4X1 released. If Nintendo had delayed Wii U until the competition released, Wii U had likely done much better as we would have already seen what the 8th generation had to offer and Wii U had, at least in theory, offered something new to them. Now nobody was waiting how the Wii U gamepad could bring something new to games we had. |
The Wii U's problem was that it was a console designed to compete with the PS3 and 360... Releasing at a time when those consoles were wrapping up their runs. It was a Wii successor that came out far too late, and as such, was stuck with an awkward, slow, and outdated PowerPC architecture that couldn't support very many engines or toolchains needed for modern development. Nintendo also naively assumed that they could go into HD using the same tools and resources they had in the Wii and GameCube days... They couldn't. So the entire company had to be restructured from within to hire more staff, and develop new tools to speed up its game development, which slowed to a crawl on Wii U, leading to games constantly being delayed and game droughts lasting up to seven months, which made its non-existent third party support that much more obvious. It didn't help that Nintendo had to also prop up the Nintendo 3DS, which was facing its own challenges at the time (Sluggish launch, exodus of third party support after the first year, similarly awkward and outdated SoC, massive competition with Smartphones).
Nintendo Switch may not be as powerful as even the base PS4, but it uses a much more modern and flexible SoC that supports the wide range of development tools needed for today's developers, which is why you see a lot of "impossible ports" and indie games on it. Nintendo themselves also has the benefit of combining handheld and console development resources into a single platform, and they've created new engines like its Bezel Engine to help get games out faster, which means the Switch has a much more consistent stream of first party games.
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bdbdbd said: I actually have Mario Kart 8 on Wii U and I don't think it really is a system seller - if it was, it had sold Wii U's. Mario Kart does fit the Switch philosophy, but it's not specifically designed to it. Mobile phone gaming isn't exactly short and easy to play. For the most part they're complex timesinks, aside from a couple of games. In terms of mobile gaming, we're technically at the same point we were back in the early 90's where the games were becoming increasingly complex. The game centric computers disappeared because the games complexity reached the point where they competed the more powerful IBM clones without the same processing power. And when the 16 bit consoles came out, the computers needed to compete with simple games like Super Mario and Sonic, along with more complex ones like Final Fantasy. |
MK8 didn't sell Wii U's because the Wii U itself wasn't a very desirable product. It was a bloated, confusing, poorly marketed platform that most people thought was a Wii add-on. And while yes, games get more complicated over time, the fact that a game like BotW has a bunch of small challenges to do inside its big, complex open world, means that you can easily have fun with it, even for only a few minutes at a time.
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bdbdbd said: Playing Super Mario Odyssey the way you described is the complete opposite to what the touch generations philosophy is, that Wii's and DS's success was build on. |
And like I said, the "Touch Generations" games aren't a focus anymore because they're not a new or novel concept like they were in 2006. Today, everybody has access to games, so the idea of something designed to "expand the gaming population" like the DS days doesn't make sense as a main focus anymore because the gaming population is already expanded. Nintendo knows this, which is why the focus has shifted to expanding the reach of their wealth of iconic IP. Hence why Mario Kart 8 is pushed as a big killer app, because it's a hugely recognizable franchise that's fun for casual and core gamers, and is on a console that's easy to take around and share with a friend. MK8 feels more at home on Switch than it ever did on Wii U.
