TheMisterManGuy said:
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.
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 It was a Wii successor that came out far too late, and as such, was stuck with an awkward, slow, and outdated PowerPC architecture that couldn't support very many engines or toolchains needed for modern development.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own challenges at the time (Sluggish launch, exodus of third party support after the first year, similarly awkward and outdated SoC, massive competition with Smartphones).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.
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.
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. |
3rd parties went to Microsoft because they weren't making money with Sony. Some games ended up looking worse on PS3 because it was easier to port games for 360 than it was for PS3 if Windows was the lead platform.
Wii U wasn't released too late, it was released too early. If it had been a year later, it would have been more powerful system than it was - and the system had benefited from the geneartion change hype. But you're right, it was a system that was designed to compete with PS360. I pointed out earlier that Iwata was good in reacting, but bad proactively. Also the controller made the system incredibly expensive, without the controller the system could have been a hundred euros cheaper, that would have been a reasonable price point for such a system.
I have Mario Kart 8, it is not a game that good that people would buy a system play it. It's the worst Mario Kart by a fair margin.
Before Wii and Nintendo DS were released, Nintendo paid attention to that people were playing games on PC - Bejeweled and such - as well as NES Classics series of games selling well. The blue ocean Nintendo wanted to tap wasn't non-gamers, but lapsed gamers. People like me who had sat through 80's and 90's with a controller in hand but had stopped gaming for whatever reason. Nintendo's expansion of gaming population was not by making games that the non-gamers would buy, but that the gamers or lapsed gamers would play with non-gamers. Just because you have mobile computer on your hand that can play games that are a huge waste of time, isn't any better than having a desktop or a laptop computer that can play games, that you could do before Wii or DS were out. Issue isn't the system, but actually the games and their values. The mobile phone games are games that are designed for 12-year olds who have all the time in the world to sit in front of a screen watching ads.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
