I completely agree.

Well Said TC, agreed all the way.

Excellent post Legend! You bring up many valid and excellent points. Especially #2 which so many seem to forget. Wii dominates in the non traditional gamer market and that's why it's winning but it'll never be dominating the traditional gamer market. At least not this gen.

Legend

Good post. I have a question about No. 3 -- where did you derive the development costs?

Also, one thing this does not address is what Rol mentioned -- the poor quality attached to many third-party offerings. Activision has recently dumped things like a several-year old PS2 port and a Wii Sports clone on the market for $40. That's the type of third-party activity that really get me.

Mike from Morgantown

Who finds himself rooting for EA because it produces a wide variety of increasingly good products for the Wii.

Excellent post Legend, well though out.

But i have to agree with what Rol said, third parties treat the Wii user-base as 2nd rate citizens. I own all three consoles now, and it is very painfully obvious.

I have yet to see anyone explain well is why will third party publishers continue to spend $10 to $30 Million to produce games like Turok, Turning Poing: Fall of Liberty, or Tom Clancy's End War which (generally speaking) sell so poorly that they will never come close to breaking even when they could develop one (or potentially more) of the best core games of the Wii and turn a healthy profit.

There are tons of developers who produced excellent PS2, XBox or Gamecube games that are struggling to manage the scope of HD projects; for the most part these developers will never be one of the best developers for the HD consoles, and they won't be able to manage the scale of these projects until they can leverage the expertise of other developers. I really don't see the logic, or the benefit, of having these developers continue developing HD console games.

One of the fundimental problems with the industry is that it's inbred. Kids who grew up playing games in the NES - PS1 days are now making today's games. Problem with that is those people want to make the same types of games they grew up with, just bigger and better.

They DO consider games for girls, 'casuals', kids, etc. second rate. They don't want to make them, it's a 'jo' job they do until they can make a 'real' game. That attitude is pervasive from low level programmer to publisher management.

Now while I could pull up lots of industry quotes to support that I can't be bothered too but who are we kidding, with few exceptions (Nintendo) you know what I'm saying is essentially true.

What will happen, in time, is girls and more 'casual players' growing up playing Wii now will be tomorrow's game developers and publishers and then you'll see the market for the other demographics continuing to grow in both size and quality.

There's certainly a market now for someone with enough foresight to start making quality games that appeal to demographics other than the one they themselves represent. Problem is could they even find quality staff who want to make it and publishers to shell out for high end games for a less established market? Probably not. The only way this will likely change in the short term is if 3rd parties start going bankrupt chasing the current 15-35 male demographic and are forced by necessary to pursue new markets.

EA and Nintendo are the only ones that cater to the blue ocean audience properly or at least try to..

Agreed.  Particularly with the bolded, lol.

Good read. Nice post, Legend11.