| marley said: So now it's Nintendo's fault and not the consumers.... and that's fine. That is more in line with reality at least. Either way, you're still giving a pass to 3rd parties that they don't deserve. Third party companies were perfectly capable of making money on the Wii, but that certainly didn't cause them to fully support it (shocker). What was the excuse for leaving money on the table this time? That they couldn't make games in HD? No one said anything about them investing 'tons of money' to make a game Nintendo fans will want. How much do you think a game like Wii Sports costs to make? Nobody is expecting 3rd parties to invest in 200M games like GTA 5, designed only for Nintendo fans. They could have made games on the Wii for a relatively small investment and still reach a very large consumer base. Most chose not to. Instead, they continued to full-heartedly support a failing console (at the time) and they released plenty of games to very low sales. They were perfectly fine with the risk of 'losing money on 2-3 games' then. I don't remember too many ultimatums being thrown around. I don't recall the consumers being blamed for the low sales. It's a double standard and it's bs. They make games that bomb on every system. It's delusional to think otherwise. You just seem to believe that only some consoles are worth that risk. They propped up the struggling ps3 and created an environment where the console could succeed. They invested money fostering a userbase that they could succeed with, that simply wasn't there at the time. Why is that situation different in your mind? Half-assed stripped down ports are not a good way to impress potential customers. It's not like consumers are arbitrarily making the choice to avoid 3rd party games on Nintendo consoles. They do it for a reason. They have been condition to think that Nintendo games are better, because on that console - they are. Yes, third party games have been unable to compete well head to head with Nintendo IPs. Do you find this statement to be false? Ignoring an entire demographic of customers, simply because you are not interested in making products that they will find interesting, is in fact 'bad business'. Spin it however you want, but that is bad business. What is good business? Ubisoft making a game like 'Just Dance' for the Wii and cashing in on it hard. It doesn't take a huge $200M investment to make a game that people will enjoy and purchase. |
Third parties didn't bring their hardcore titles over to Wii because, yes, they didn't want to downgrade them, they didn't want to figure out special control schemes for them and they knew the audience for those games wasn't on the Wii. But third parties did definitely support the Wii, cause that thing had huge hardware sales and a huge casual base. They released nearly every game that had a more causal appeal on that system as well and even created some successful IPs that were especially aimed at the Wii audience like Just Dance or Skylanders. But at the same time you can also look at Fifa and Cod, which also released annually on Wii, those games could, again, only make money because the user base was so big, cause only 1-2% of the Wii owners really played those games.
Now look at the Wii U, while 1-2% on the Wii still translated to over a million in sales, on the Wii U it means something like 30-60 thousand sales and those games need to be HD now so they are a good bit more expensive, that is financial suicide, so there is the reason why publishers are slowly stopping their Wii U support. Now why did third parties rather take the risk on the PS3. Simple, because PS3 owners actually bought third party games if they were good and also since the 360 demographic was pretty similar to the PS3s a release on both only made sense, I mean hell the first Assassin's Creed sold 440.000 units in its first week on a PS3 userbase of 6.2 million.
I think third party games have been very capable of going head to head with Nintendo games in the past, on the GC for example Resident Evil 4 is still one of the best games. That whole thing kinda crumbled once again though when Nintendo came out with console significantly weaker than the competition and with a different input method, so again Nintendo made things extremely inconvenient for third parties and since like I said the average third party game on Wii only sold to 1-2% of the user base, the incentive to put in huge amounts of work wasn't there. Now on Wii U the incentive is even smaller, since the user base is small and no one buys third party games.
And yeah sure, releasing Dance Central on a 60 million userbase filled with families and women etc., on the hight of the motion gaming craze is absolutely smart business. Wasting funds on a console that has not sold 2 million units in the last 10 months, has a user base under 5 million that has an extremely different taste than the other console bases and that does not care much about third parties anyway is not smart, especially since Wii U development costs are naturally higher than on the Wii.
