Anfebious said:
I agree that John Lucas was too extreme with the things he said. But... It's also true that the PS3 had almost the same issue. The PS3 didn't catter to third parties. It was harder to develop for and lost a lot of time exclusives to the Xbox 360 in the 7th generation. But... even with that difficulty third parties didn't hesitate to develop for it. Sure, ports of PS3 multiplaform games where crappy but that didn't stop them from releasing them. In the Wii U's case I doubt it's as hard as the PS3 was to develop for. There is no excuse not to release ports for the Wii U. The PS3 wasn't doing as bad as the Wii U but it wasn't doing too hot either and it still got third prty games. I do agree that it was dumb to release the console so hastily. But maybe this article can help understand why they did it: http://www.dromble.com/2014/01/07/dolphin-tale-story-of-gamecube/ Yeah I know it's absurdly long. But in one of the paragraphs it talks about how Nintendo wanted to release the N64 and GC before the Playstation 1 and 2 and failed to do so both times. Maybe they wanted to have the headstart this time. Either way it seems that the strategy of releasing the Wii U first didn't pay off. |
A lot of developers did avoid the PS3 at first. Gabe Newell refused to develop for it, Activision threatened to pull support entirely, and the 360 got a ton of timed exclusives in it's first few years. The issue being that the PS3 was selling fine. It wasn't doing great but it managed nearly 8 million in it's first full year on the market. The WiiU barely sold 3 million. The key difference here is that the WiiU's sales aren't enough justify the awful developer enviroment, the PS3's were. The PS3 was also even with the 360 in terms power and performance, it wasn't lagging behind the generation like the WiiU is. Meaning that devs didn't have to downgrade any 360 or PC ports to fit them on the PS3.
And that GCN history was a great read. I'd recommend it to anyone. I understand they wanted a headstart, the 360 and PS2 benefitted greatly from this. But releasing first isn't always the best strategy. Look at the Saturn or Dreamcast. If Nintendo was going to release it early then they should have made sure they had the software to support the launch. It was obvious the PS4 and XBO were only a year or so away and both consoles were going to blow the WiiU out of the water in terms of power. Their main strategy should have been to build a strong userbase quickly in order to persuade 3rd parties to make games for it. That's what the PS2 did even though the Gamecube and Xbox were much stronger systems. They screwed this up by not releasing any games for like 7 months. They must have underestimated the difficulties of HD development.
Now it's too late. Mario Kart and Smash Bros will help boost sales but then what? A new Zelda? Metroid? It's going to have to survive purely on Nintendo games which means it's not going to do any better than the GCN. Hell, it might even do worse. My main point was that Nintendo has no one but themselves to blame for this. It's not politics, it's common sense. Why waste time and money developing for a system without any worthwhile returns? Nobody can tell the future, but it boggles the mind as to why Nintendo couldn't envision a scenario like this. They experienced it twice with the GCN and N64! At least with the N64 they still had Rare to help them out. And great job losing Rare by the way. It's not like they nearly single handedly kept the N64 alive or anything. But I've already gone way off topic. Nintendo will be fine in the long run, it's not like this is going to bankrupt them or anything, I just expect them to try a little harder with their next console.
Sigs are dumb. And so are you!
