RolStoppable said:
Sal.Paradise said:
But, if you're a fairly major publisher, whether you're developing a new IP or an old one, why put it on the system where the sales of every single shooter game indicate it is a smaller market?
It really is that simple.
You have two options; go for the market that can get your game potentially half a million to 2 million tops if you are lucky, or develop a game that can sell on 3 seperate platforms and where you're almost guaranteed to sell more, even in cases on only 1 of those 3 platforms?
There are so many middling or straight up poor shooters that have been forgotten about since their release on the PS360/PC, yet they have sales in the hundreds of thousands that only the top 13/14 Wii shooters could touch.
I don't think there are any proper figures that show developing shooters for the Wii is safer or potentially more rewarding for a developer than developing for the PS360/PC.
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But that wasn't the case one year after the Wii had launched and that's when the decisions had to be made. You can't talk from the 2012 perspective and say that because third parties shaped the market the way it is by ignoring the Wii that this is the best possible outcome for third parties. Especially when the record revenues generated this generation didn't lead to record profits.
By the end of 2007 you didn't know what the ceiling for a FPS or TPS is on the Wii. You knew that a lacking FPS (Red Steel) crossed the million mark, showing that there is interest in such games on the Wii. You knew that a port (RE4) crossed the million mark, showing that there is interest in such games on the Wii as well. It was also clear that Red Steel was very much frontloaded while the better game, RE4, had significantly better legs. So better quality would lead to better sales.
I'd like you to answer this question: You have seen that RE4: WE sold minimum 1.3m units; this was a port of a game that was originally launched two and a half years earlier; do you believe the ceiling for a new RE game launching in 2009 (assuming a 18-24 months development cycle) would have been 2m units?
The only reason why 2m became the ceiling for FPS/TPS on the Wii is because nobody seriously tried to get beyond that point; and if disappointment after disappointment gets released, the market eventually crumbles. Gamers realize that they can't expect anything good coming out, so they are forced to move on.
On a sidenote, I asked kowenicki to provide examples that prove the lack of a viable market on the Wii. He has none, that's probably why he lets you do the work here.
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I don't mind doing the work for Kowenicki :)
Again, the very same argument applies: the market on the Wii was there, but a significantly better market was available on the HD twins + PC.
You say: "But that wasn't the case one year after the Wii had launched "
Yes it's very reasonable to assume that third parties chose not to develop shoooters for the Wii based on the Gamecube's performance last generation. And after games like Red Steel and RE4 Wii Edition sold around 1-1.5 million in a year, you're very right to ask, aren't these good numbers? Aren't these indicators to companies that these games sell on the Wii?
Yes, they are, but now compare these numbers to the HD twins + PC. From games released in 2005-2007
1. Exclusive launch title for the 360 and a new IP, Gears of War: By January 19, 2007, just ten weeks after its debut, over three million units of the game had been sold
2. Exclusive launch title for the PS3 and a new IP: (remember, a console with a $599 barrier to entry and significantly bad press pre and post launch), Resistance 1: by June 15 2007, after only 8 months on the market in Japan and US and only 2-3 months in Europe, sales reached 2 million
3. Call of Duty 2, a port of a game already available on PS2, Gamecube and Xbox, launch title for 360: As of July 2006, 1.4 million copies of the game had been sold on the Xbox 360.[45] By January 2008, the game had sold 2 million copies.[46]
4. Halo 3. While it is no surprise this game sold massively, the potential market for this franchise ALONE is a convincing reason for a developer to release shooters on the HD consoles, especially the 360.
I am not surprised in the least that companies, seeing these figures and having initially planned to develop for the HD twins (before seeing the Wii explode in hardware sales), continued to develop for platforms other than the Wii. The market for those games largely moved to the HD twins, especially the 360.
Another factor to take into account is that the advances in processing power were just expected to happen in next-gen consoles; developers, especially PC-centric ones like Epic or id, simply stuck to the path they knew best, and that's is an unfortunate (for Wii owners) by-product of the shift in strategy on Nintendo's part.
Of course, a massive shift in focus was also due to the seminal Call of Duty 4 not launching on the Wii. And can you blame Activision? The game-changing extensive multiplayer component and the 'blockbuster' nature of the game; high production values, for the time impressive graphic effects and smooth 60fps, i.e. the reasons this franchise exploded, were just something that people did not see in Wii games at the time.
The market was always stronger on the HD twins, there is no argument.
Any company that wanted to make money with these types of games would have orignially developed them for 360/PS3 based on the pervious gen's performance, and then at the beginning of the 7th gen, there is no metric that shows the Wii was a better market for their games than its competitors.
It's a closed and shut deal.
You cannot blame developers and publishers for simply 'not trying' to take advantage of the market on the Wii, unless you want to blame companies for trying to make money.
