Nintendo's systems, since SNES, have often been hit and miss with 3rd party publishers, so it will be a miracle if we can get some great titles for the Project Cafe, whatever it is.  Emily Rogers suggested in an article that Nintendo is courting American publishers over Japanese publishers, which is causing me concern.  Does this mean that Cafe will NEVER get METAL GEAR SOLID, FINAL FANTASY, KINGDOM HEARTS, DRAGON QUEST, etc., IOW, all the other franchises promised for 3DS?  I hope not, because I think that would kill the point of making the system accessible to hardcore gamers.  Don't you think so?

Hopefully I'm proven wrong, and that we will indeed see such entries on Cafe.  But only time will tell.

I wouldn't listen to her if I were you, she's been proven wrong about lots of stuff on many occasions

But think about it this way, if Wii could get multiple games/spin-offs from half the game series you listed, I don't see how Cafe could possibly do worse :p

Nintendos only gotta do one thing!

Moneyhat.

Nintendo looking towards western developers?

Bow chika wow wow.

Western developers will be harder to win over due to the console sales breakdown in the West compared to Japan.  In Japan, due to the 360's almost irrelevancy saleswise, the Wii has a large marketshare (58.8% atm).  This should in itself attract 3rd party support for it's successor.  Hell, even the Wii had decent Japanese 3rd party support at times (ToG, SW3, MH3, RF:F and hopefully soon DQX).

However, for the West as the home consoles sales are a 3 horse race, the PS3 and 360 (which developers often see as one mega-platform) has the numerical advantage.  This results in less major 3rd party support and helps account for why we haven't seen a Western eqivilent of Monster Hunter 3 or Tales of Graces on Wii.

I think we will definitely see decent multi-platform support from Ubisoft and Activision, which means Assassin's Creed as well as more complete COD experiences.

Beyond that, things start to become a bit murky... I have a feeling that Epic for example will not be an early supporter of Cafe, as well as EA. On the other hand I think some support from Crytek is likely as well as Rockstar since they have in fact given reasonable support to Wii, especially in its early years.

I expect support from Epic/EA to be determined by the level of success Crytek and Activision see on the console during its first year or two.

What I'd really like to see however is some of the smaller studios bring their games to Cafe, like Gearbox, Double-Fine, Croteam, id software and so on..

On the Japanese side I hope for better representation from Namco (this includes Team Aces) mainly. Square and Capcom don't have too much that interest me at the moment, and MGS is not a 'must-have' title for me either.

It's not like Nintendo are going to forget about Japanese devs, it's just that they're going to be focusing more on Western ones than they did in the past. Iwata said a few things along these lines a while ago at some investor's briefing (it was even posted here on VGC), along with a comment about hopefully being able to show us some results of those actions @ this year's E3. So... 7 more days!

- I can see a lot of support in terms of old ports and some 3rd party exclusives.

- But not multiplats, 3rd party IMO would develop multiplats for 360/ps3 only

I highly disagree.  Devs/pubs would love to have a 3rd (or 4th if you include PC) platform to amortize costs upon.

Porting would be cheap and quick and the pay off would result in much more revenue even if sales are lower than the other consoles.  I'll show an example below:

Game costs $20 million for the core work across X360/PS3.  Porting to Project Cafe would take a team of 10 about 2-3 months.  That's $80,000 (average salary this year) x 10 = $800,000 / 6 or 4 (prorated for the year) = $133,333 - $200,000.

Publisher gets $20 per unit sold....you'd need to sell just 10,000 units to make it worth the effort.

So you get they are salivating at the idea of another paltform to spread costs across.   Ubisoft has already gone on record stating they will easily be able to port over existing and upcoming HD console IP's to Project Cafe and plan to do so.

I was basically referring to the initial year of Project Cafe and to the majority of new multiplats based on the notion of bigger established userbase..I could be wrong.

Anyhow, there are other costs beside labour that you need to consider (overhead, opportunity costs, production costs, tax , learning curve costs etc). And because we dont really know what these costs are (including labour costs) we simply cannot make up facts like that 10,000 figure you calculated.

Plus, what if that majority of the cafe version is bought by multiconsole owners, that would risk other versions potential sales.