I'ts not as bad on the 360 because you don't know in advance that MS + EA + Activision will come up with kick ass MUST-BUY games every year.

Yes, they have had success recently but they don't own enough kick ass franchises to be able to dominate the market every year with 4-5 titles the way Nintendo can with their own franchises..

The way I see it the Wii market is divided as follow :

1) the more casual with less time/money player : buys 2-3 titles a year top, probably doesn't spend so much time researching his games, probably can't dodge Nintendo commercials on TV. End up buying mostly Nintendo titles and rarely some random title on the side

2) The more informed gamer, kinda Nintendo fan, still without too much money/title on their hand (some of them post on this site) : Buy Nintendo titles because they know they rock, probably buys a few non Nintendo titles based on good reviews and word of the mouth. Probably was a gamecube owner...

3) The more hardcore player. Bought a Wii this gen because it's doing well and he wanted all 2, maybe 3 consoles. Buys Nintendo big hits, buy games on others consoles too, doesn't really need more big games on the Wii because he has his others consoles 2.

My view is 2 was a gamecube owner last gen, 1) and 3) weren't and made the jump due to the success of the Wii.

Problem is that 2 is really the biggest audience third party would have on the Wii and it's probably the smallest of the 3 Wii audiences...

It doesn't mean third party can't have big success on the Wii. But I feel they actually have more competition on that console because of Nintendo home games than they would have on the HD consoles..

Right now, the only companies that understood what the Wii was about are Capcom and... EA and it's paying them.

Ail,

I think there is a thread of truth in what you say but that you're heavily overestimating the impact of the effect you describe, and underestimate other factors which may balance out the situation.

In the past, as the number of people who own a system grows there seems to be a dramatic drop off in the number of games bought per system on a monthly basis. I suspect that one of the (untracked) reasons for this is most systems that have had massive userbases in recent times have had hardware defects which caused people to buy new systems, or the hardware had revisions which encouraged people to buy additional systems; consider that the Playstation and PS2 were plagued by the Disc-Read error, the Gameboy had the Gameboy pocket and Gameboy colour, the Gameboy Advance had the SP, and the Nintendo DS had the DS-Lite. We can't say for sure what kind of an overall impact this has had on the attach rate, but it is reasonable to say that the overall lower sales effect is inflated.

At the same time, one of the more interesting effects of the Wii is that it is much more likely to be used by most or all of the people in a household in comparison to the PS3, XBox 360 or previous consoles; even 13 year old hard-core gamer 'Jimmy' who owns an XBox 360 may actually play Wii games if one is released that interests him. Now, if you go from having '1 or 2 people who are dedicated to buying games on a regular basis' to '1 to 2 people who are dedicated to buying games on a regular basis and 2 to 3 people who will occasionaly buy games' it means that there is the potential for greater sales per system than we have seen in the past.

Seeing NMH and Metroid (which is the hugest Ninty "hardcore" franchise from last gen) sales on the Wii really does deterr dev's from making "hardcore" games I think. The Blue Ocean strategy has a consequence; expect many Blue Ocean games. It is very simple and 95% of the money made on Wii game sales will be this type of game (s).
I do think 3rd party support could improve in quantity, but I don't see the overall leap in quality. Don't expect everyone to suddenly start developing hardcore titles on the one platform that can't seem to move such titles very well at all.

Does group 1 even know the difference between a Nintendo published game and a non-Nintendo published game? I expect they can pick out things with Wii, Pokemon, or Mario in the name but do they have any idea about a Metroid or Pikimin. This isn't the fact they are Nintendo published but that these are strong brand names which will sell well to these people. Third parties skipping advertising and running weak brands against them are going to get trashed. It is probably why things like MySims sold well, the Sims name helps it with this group -- might have done even better with some TV ads.

I think it's pretty much accepted that the lead platform will attract the most shovelware , I think Nintendo has a responsibility to help the customer differentiate between the quality it offers and the shovelware released on the console.

Maybe a new type of "Seal of quality" ?

Crap Developer Meeting Summary:

"Lets make a crap game that will sell 50.000 copies and get us enough money to buy a decent car.
Should we make it on PS360 or on Wii at 1/5 price ?"

I think the answer is quite predictable.

Good business model: Make games for less money, release on platform with largest user base.

Bad business model: Make games at high cost, release on platform with small user base.

How many times do we have to go down this road?

The Wii gets shovel ware because:
1. It's the best selling system this gen, and that's not changing for at least the next 2 years (and probably not at all), which makes it a draw for the cheap, lazy and incompetent (as was the case with the 2600, NES, SNES, PS1, and PS2 before it).
2. This problem has been compounded by the fact that the PS2 still has a huge, active user base, and many of those lazy developers are still developing Wii games with an eye towards that platform. That will change.
3. It had been almost completely dismissed by most third parties until about a year ago. They are shifting gears, and we are starting to see some evidence of the "good" games coming along (Conduit, Mad World), and it will be reinforced if good games sell well, which they do appear to do.

in terms of third party support and announcements Q2 08 has so far been better than q1 08 which was better than Q4 07 and so on - I also think that the Wii's sales in the face of GTA4 wil have shocked a lot of people and Wii Fit and the attachment rate of the balance board will shock people even more.

EA has already announced 3 balance board games, have a 2.8m shipped (Wii and DS) franchise in my sims and launching quality titles like boom blox and skate it looks promising, companies like Majestico are thinking outside the box with blastworks and smaller devs like High Voltage are throwing huge weight behind the Wii.

The ball is rolling and still picking up speed which is a nice bonus to Nintendo and Wii owners but until E3 comes around when I expect we'll see massive Ninty announcements like Wii Music, Animal Crossing, Pikmin 3, DDOC to ensure the Wii isn't going anywhere soon.

Ummmm fleeing?

I read your thoughts and I have to say wah the hell are you smoking?

The reasons for third parties leaving the Wii are the non-10 million dollar budgets, lack of HD graphics and so fourth. Like hell thats why any developers are leaving the Wii, if anything those are positive benefits for developers. Instead of having to gamble 10+ million dollars on a game that might not do so well they can gamble less like 4-million on a game for Wii that is sure to at least sell 100k.

Developers migrating to PS3,360. Thats complete nonesense if anything publishers are migrating towards the Wii. EAGames , Disney Interactive , Hudson Soft, UbiSoft, Interplay, Majesco all have Wii specific development studios that only make Wii games. Then you have other publishers who are beginning to invest more and more into the Wii like THQ, Activision.

Now yes their are the many shovel ware producers like Bold Entertainment who produce one game after another using the same engine the same material over and over again. Cheap glitchy and void of any real substanance. However these publishers are using their ill gotten gains to begin work on legitamet products which could end up making them the next big publishers.

To be honest companies like High Voltage and JetBlackGames are simply taking advantage of the lack of enthusiasm in the games industry. Too many publishers are happy producing games on their older graphics/physics and AI engines rather then building new ones for the Wii. Many of todays game companies use established engines like Epic's Unreal engines, so they wait for somebody to make a better engine for them to use.

Epic did port the Unreal3 engine to the Wii. UbiSoft notably called it the Unreal 2.5 Engine which it began using in many of its Wii games. Fact is when JetBlack and High Voltage get there engines on the market developers are likely to pick them up and use them to improve their games.

So is their really a flight of third party support, No. Developers are cheaping out on the Wii because they can. When High Voltage and Jet Black up the standards they will be quick to change their ways. Infact within a day or so of High Voltage showing off their engine over 10-publishers had contacted them to liscense it!

10-publishers wanting High Voltages new graphics engine and the shooter Conduit. Is that seen as a shortage?