Good to see Square giving the Wii some credit. It is about time companies started taking the machine seriously. The Wii has reached an installed base of 20 million units within some 13 months of release, with something like a 5 million unit installed base in Japan. There are monster sales to be had here if the right games are produced. We already saw a Dragon Quest spin-off manage a quick-fire 500k in Japan alone when the user base was a fair bit lower; lots of untapped potential for third parties here, especially with the low development costs!! Take this system seriously Square and you will make a lot of money very quickly.

I really don't ever see third party developers taking the Wii seriously, despite its success, this will probably be just another generation where only Nintendo games thrive on a Nintendo console because third party developers made it so.

Third party developers seem to have been so spoiled by conglomorates like Sony and MS which rely largely/solely on third party support and have money to throw around that its no wonder why real gaming companies like Sega couldn't compete. Oddly enough though Atari, Sega and Nintendo all seemed driven by fate to make foolish mistakes allowing this to happen. Its only Nintendo's keen business sense that has allowed them to survive this long. But it seems once the developers had their taste of the good life on big business consoles they don't want to go back to an era where they have to compete without offers of purchased exclusives, handouts, favors or gracious financial assistance.

In response to Sony's fall they scrambled to resolve their shaken once held certainty in the market by adopting new and cowardly strategies of randomly sprinking their exclusives on all the consoles in hopes of assuring themselves at least some profit if not a foot in every door no matter what the future brings for the consoles. They've become so lazy in wake of Sony's domination that they don't even know how to approach a generation not owned by Sony. In the end, its the consumer who is made to play the fool because developers don't want to venture the slightest risk in investing in any one console over another. Franchises are haphazardly split across multiple consoles, spin-offs and rehashes are the new answer to multi-platform support. Lessons learned in generations past are quickly overshadowed by fears of an uncertain future and an upstart return of gaming's former king which defies everything they've held to be sacred in gaming's past.

Well it hasn't stopped third parties from flocking to the DS, Square especially.

I really hope that the main FF series does not go to the Wii, FF has evolved over the different platforms to be a game that is expected to be graphically amazing (i still remember my jaw dropping when i seen footage of FFX on the PS2, it was amazing) so it would be a major step-back from FFXIII if FFXIV was on the Wii imo...

Regarding your second paragraph how can u seriously even suggest that development costs for a couple of ps3 games compares to the Spirits within movie. The losses alone for that movie were in excess of $120 million dollars. Having said that I will happily rescind my statement if you provide sources which support your claim

I really don't agree. Let's not forget that Nintendo wasn't the nicest partner in the past and that it upset a lot of developers (especially SE) by sticking to the cartridge format. Also it's quite normal that developers weren't cheering to develop for Nintendo's newest console. After all the Gamecube was quite a disaster, which wasn't the fault of the 3rd parties, and Nintendo took a very uncertain path with Wii.

Now Nintendo proved that the Wii is a very attractive console which has amazing sales I'm sure the developers will show very good games for Wii. In a sence I feel Nintendo is going back to the SNES days, with big profits for Nintendo AND 3rd parties.

I even want to make this bet with you: There will be at least 15 3rd party games reviewed this year that recieve an 8.5 or higher on IGN of which five even above 9.0. For reference: this year there were 7 above 8.5 of which 2 9.0. If not I'll put an appology in my sig+you can determine my avatar for a month. Deal?

well i hope square enix make more wii games

WELL ffxiii and vs cost-probably- combined ~50 million...


imo they're shooting themselves in the foot if they do not develop a GOOD game on the wii.

as has been seen in the past year,

Good 3rd party games sell Very well on the Wii.

Capcom has 2 or 3 of them
sega has a few of them
Se has had what....DQ:S that was only a so-so game- and even that sold well.

@Lenardo:

Chocobo's Mystery Dungeo wasn't a particularly big succes (though that must be the definition of a Spin-Off game).