The odds that most third parties are incompetent is actually pretty high. Whatever your console affiliation, anyone who follows gaming news should be able to pick out that most publishers in this industry are pretty myopic at most times and downright stupid at others.

Then how come both the ps4 and x1 had higher percentage they launched in nov?

Impressive 2%... that's twice the effort

Imagine once upon a time that DLC was just something you downloaded, it patched into the original game enough to show it was there and then that was the total amount resources necessary.

The REALITY, the REALITY is that by now, all these bits of software and the tools to create them should be inexpensive and commoditized. Like when a car is made, they make loads of them, the tolerances are tight and they are churned out quickly and relatively inexpensively.

The claims by many in the videogame industry appear to be that these games are still very much like fashioning an airplane. There is a set of plans but in the end, it is almost like they are completely custom creations crafted rather than manufactured.

The industry can choose that path if it wants and many publishers are going broke as a result. That isn't the fault of Nintendo or anyone else. I just know that the numbers outside of the videogame industry are massive. Apple is selling as many iOS devices in a quarter as there are Xbox 360's sold lifetime as an example. Within that OTHER industry, the costs seem to scale appropriately, everything works well enough and the costs always seem to be going down, not up.

The videogame industry keeps claiming the opposite of productivity and efficiency gains. They keep turning around and making each solution the problem. Each time the cost keeps going up. That isn't Nintendo's fault. Outside of consoles the servers don't cost so much they require a yearly online fee. Outside of consoles DLC doesn't need massive numbers of employees and teams just to make an add-on pack. These excuses are lame and don't match reality.

Outside of consoles someone can release a game with online play, in game ads, for free and make $50k a day while EA needs to charge micro-transactions just to somehow make it through the financial quarter.

It's bullshit and it isn't Nintendo's fault.

Rayman Legends was late and was MORE expensive on Wii U then any other system. Should consumers pay more for the same game?

The other games all had frame rate, glitches and less content.

Zombi U? It looks like a Wii game that they quickly ported over. If dev costs were so high, why didn't they release it for the other systems as well?

The games industry is based on money. Sony struck a deal awhile ago with Ubisoft to make a movie. You think there were no stipulations on that deal?

How about the Vita? Oh yeah... nobody cares because it's a Sony platform (it is 0%: https://www.ubisoftgroup.com/comsite_common/en-US/images/d20140210030508ubisoft%20q3%20fy14%20english%20finaltcm99128069.pdf )

The Vita is getting next to no sales across the board for third parties yet it continues to get their support.  Go figure!

First Ubi didn't make COD. You mention ZombiU. It sold no worse than Red Steel I or II. Those were both exclusives to Nintendo consoles as well. The difference is that somehow they didn't lose money while selling over 650k copies. Apparently in this day and age you can sell that much and still lose your ass. That isn't the fault of Nintendo though.

AC4 wasn't a great effort. It was just a port from PS3/360. In this day and age the engines and content shouldn't have a big problem scaling. On PC turning all these resolutions and features on or off isn't an entire support team or some massive level of personnel. It is a preferene setting within the app. That said the game still works, still sells fewer copies and DLC and other items are available.

Did you read what I just typed? The PC version of ACIV has sold .37 million copies, and appears to not have any money, online server, DLC or other concerns even with a massive number of hardware configurations to deal with in terms of support.

This stuff should all be easy, scalable and flexible by now. If it isn't and needs to have millions being spent fine tuning and massaging it, that is on the publisher, not Nintendo. Again on the mobile side the prices are a tenth, the support concerns a magnatude of order larger and at all works out.

Consoles were supposed to be the solution to expensive, buggy and time intensive PC's. Put a game in and play without concerns about drive updates, incompatibilty, etc.

Instead the whole industry has become LIKE the PC industry which is expensive and dying on the vine.

That industry is dying because when someone can take an iPad and replicate an app for $10 that used to cost $300 on the PC, and then required a $1000 box with $200 service contract, there wasn't anyway that someone would choose the latter. They choose the former and on top of it the former is a magnatude of order cheaper and easier.

I use Apple as an example but the reality is that you can do just as well with $150 Kindle or some cheap Android tablet. Perhaps the experience is 10-15% better on a console but if the costs are several hundred percent higher then the industry is dead.

The question isn't about Nintendo. The question is why can Ubisoft not make a profit when selling a quarter million copies at $60 a pop. When all they are doing is taking the same content, the same engine and sending it all off to the same places to be burned and packaged in the same packaging with slightly different color paper in the sleeve, why is $15,000,000 not enough to make a dime on that? A team of 5-10 people could easily modify that game engine for WiiU. Even if it took them a year and you paid them $150k each that would be $3 million a most. Nevermind that a team of ten people slaving away for a year should probably get your an entirely new engine, not just modify an existing one.

The numbers for the console industry don't make sense. It's much like cable, YouTube and movies. Every new movie is a blockbuster that cost a quarter billion to make, requires a quarter billion in marketing and most of the time yields a movie that is still a smelly turd. Compare that with Walking Dead which gets by on about $3 million per episode and that means an entire season can cost less than $60 million for hours more of entertainment.

The cost of entertainment is becoming profoundly commoditized. Nintendo isn't the problem there. They are actually doing as well as can be done in my opinion. Supporting a failed model for longer doesn't change the fact it is failed. Microsoft is losing money, Sony is losing money and Nintendo is losing money all while most of them are charging more than ever for the same experience but now with more.... who really knows what to justy the higher costs.

I'm arguing from a corporate-cultural perspective. Basically the third parties (which in this conversation really means the western third parties. The Japanese have a very different approach to Wii U which seems to lead to less support overall, but better support when it actually arrives). The entrenched mindsets of the industry as a whole are the same or similar across the different Western third parties. No one is really thinking outside the box or pursuing a different strategy in any respect.

The mistakes are more or less the same across the board. The *outcomes* of the mistakes are what differ depending on what consoles we're talking about

I've gotten so tired of questionable business decisions that I'm looking forward to finishing up my marketing degree next year and taking over an influential position in one of these companies. If you have low sales, you put in some EXTRA effort to attempt to gain some market share/brand respect. What boggles my mind is how NO ONE has done so. I still can't think of a single original third party Wii U title that had full effort and release date timing with other platforms (Rayman was delayed, and fans like me refused to support the bs- say what you will). Not one. The ports have been shabby at best.

Look at the GameCube. Madden was great. The 007 games were great. Just because the games didn't sell all that well, they didn't put them out to die and make them half-assed.

At this point, and I'm not even kidding, I think there is a massive behind-the-scenes conspiracy by the big companies to try to take Nintendo out of the market completely. If you think about it, everything fits. The indies love the Wii U, but the big guys don't. I don't know why, and I don't know that I'll ever figure it out, but that has to be the explanation. I highly doubt Iwata is as inept or feeble as people think, even when he makes mistakes.