I stopped considering buying an EA games even if it's on sale for $1 up until the NFSHP fiasco, regardless of what platform.

There's only so many excuses before their customers return the FU to them.

I stopped considering buying an EA games even if it's on sale for $1 up until the NFSHP fiasco, regardless of what platform.

There's only so many excuses before their customers return the FU to them.

EA is about making money, I doubt they went out of their way to sabotage another path of revenue just to stick it to Nintendo and Nintendo fans. EA aren't the only company that have had trouble selling games on the Wii and like most other publishers, they've found that other audiences are more open to spend money on their products, so they shift resources around to provide for the people who are actually buying third party games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIkEdyvHgzU&hd=1

:0?????? comments??

Why iPhone can handle a proper Dead Space game, and Wii have to suffer with an On rails Shooter?

What I don't understand is how some of our oldest members, intelligent and eloquent ones at that, can fail to see this? 3rd parties are not acting out of some childish spite and don't have a hidden agenda to sabotage a console. Nintendo have a strained relationship with 3rd parties ever since the mid 80's and that is a widely known fact. Making a console that makes cross platform development practically impossible without massive modifications didn't help much either.

...

As a developer, I would like to add another facet to this reasoning - something that I'm not sure is an actual concern in the game studios, but sounds likely to me.

We keep hearing how Wii development costs much less - mainly because of the reduced asset costs. But while an investor considers ROI, a studio might also consider the "Return over Intellectual investment".

Basically investing your time in learning to code for iOS devices and building frameworks and engines for it is apparently considered well spent by many. That has probably to do with the underlying platform being perceived  as offering chances for returns in the future: the iOS platform is almost as strictly defined as the Wii one but it will offer a continuous upgrade path in the future with the synchronous evolution of OS and hardware. Couple this with an even lower cost for assets than Wii development, and you get the attractiveness.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get the 360, the PS3 and the PC. And while the three have very different architectures in many regards, there are some intellectual capitals that are needed by all platforms and that will surely be spendable in the future as well.

For example, this was the generation of consoles that forced developers to really master multicore, multithreaded machines. It's no longer just the optimization of a set of shaders, but also offloading and balancing computation and i/o jobs like never before. The guys working on the Unreal engine explicitly declared that they learned a lot about multithread optimization by working on the 360 that they then backported to the PC engine. And I'm sure that when the guys at Naughty Dog or SCE Santa Monica developed some color space, anitaliasing or animation technique, they are thinking of how they will spend it or evolve it with even more threads or cores, and they would be able to do the same on the 360 or a PC mutatis mutandis.

The Wii might be in a position where a dev might be cautious to invest training/time/money in the tech because it's a perceived as a mid-term project with much less universal / long-term returns.

No, no, its a conspiracy to spite Wii owners, we all know this.

Look at the attach rates for this generation's consoles (and recent surveys on weekly playtime)  and look at the relative size of the markets and installed base (Wii vs HD consoles) and this is a no brainer for a lot of publishers. Online gaming is also becoming a bigger and bigger factor, which will also detract from someone's wish to publish games on the Wii.

"3rd party games don't sell on the Wii" is a false statement but they do appear to sell considerably less than their HD counterparts (when such are present). See the sales of Black Ops for instance. I can certainly understand why a lot of developers and publishers remain skeptical.They have to choose between high development costs with a high potential profit or low development costs with a proven smaller chance of high profits (yes, a lot of developers make a profit on the Wii but if the break-even point is 250k and you sell 300k it doesn't make it more attractive than having a break-even point of 1 million and selling 1.5 million across two platforms, just as an example. Also notice, I said "high" profits and not simply profits).

What I don't understand is how some of our oldest members, intelligent and eloquent ones at that, can fail to see this? 3rd parties are not acting out of some childish spite and don't have a hidden agenda to sabotage a console. Nintendo have a strained relationship with 3rd parties ever since the mid 80's and that is a widely known fact. Making a console that makes cross platform development practically impossible without massive modifications didn't help much either.

PS: Yeah, I'll get tons of flack for this, so be it. All three consoles have had major issues this gen, 360 with hardware quality, PS3 with insane price and loss of exclusives and the Wii with 3rd party support. That's just the way it is.

As a developer, I would like to add another facet to this reasoning - something that I'm not sure is an actual concern in the game studios, but sounds likely to me.

We keep hearing how Wii development costs much less - mainly because of the reduced asset costs. But while an investor considers ROI, a studio might also consider the "Return over Intellectual investment".

Basically investing your time in learning to code for iOS devices and building frameworks and engines for it is apparently considered well spent by many. That has probably to do with the underlying platform being perceived  as offering chances for returns in the future: the iOS platform is almost as strictly defined as the Wii one but it will offer a continuous upgrade path in the future with the synchronous evolution of OS and hardware. Couple this with an even lower cost for assets than Wii development, and you get the attractiveness.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get the 360, the PS3 and the PC. And while the three have very different architectures in many regards, there are some intellectual capitals that are needed by all platforms and that will surely be spendable in the future as well.

For example, this was the generation of consoles that forced developers to really master multicore, multithreaded machines. It's no longer just the optimization of a set of shaders, but also offloading and balancing computation and i/o jobs like never before. The guys working on the Unreal engine explicitly declared that they learned a lot about multithread optimization by working on the 360 that they then backported to the PC engine. And I'm sure that when the guys at Naughty Dog or SCE Santa Monica developed some color space, anitaliasing or animation technique, they are thinking of how they will spend it or evolve it with even more threads or cores, and they would be able to do the same on the 360 or a PC mutatis mutandis.

The Wii might be in a position where a dev might be cautious to invest training/time/money in the tech because it's a perceived as a mid-term project with much less universal / long-term returns.