Rpruett said:
Kenny said:
Just to keep things in perspective...
For your assertion that the Wii was the safe bet, we are going to have to agree to disagree on that one. If you remember the GameCube last generation, Nintendo was on the verge of being rendered totally irrelevant in the console wars. The number of loyalists who would buy their hardware no matter what had gotten smaller than ever, and by 2005, people never spoke of the GameCube when it came to console gaming. When you consider that they totally defied everyone's expectations by diverting their focus from graphics to controls, I can think of no bigger risk they could have taken. The PS3, I hold, was not (meant to be) a risk in the least, because it stayed in famliar territory and took the route of "bigger and better", which was exactly what the gaming media and the market expected.
You and I are talking risk to totally different quantities. I'm talking the Nintendo bottom line (And by bottom line I mean money). They were taking no risk monetarily (In terms of losses) on the Wii. Minimal sales probably still would have been enough to form a profit on the system.
Coming out with a new controller isn't that risky as far as I'm concerned. (Nintendo has released a new controller type every generation thus far) Which is all the Wii has done.
Risky, would be doing something like Microsoft did last generation or similar to what Sony did this generation.
On the idea that third parties will simply make their games multiplatform, isn't that what they're already doing? As well, how much more money can third parties demand? Rockstar got $50 million in assistance for GTA IV, and their parent company recently posted a loss even after selling 13 million copies! I've been watching the third party financial reports, and I'm seeing that even companies like EA are losing money in the face of record revenues (granted Activision is still making money, but World of Warcraft is an exceptional money-printing case). Simply put, the reports make me question whether HD game development is fundamentally sustainable given the current methods in use.
The costs of HD development will drop. SD development has forged onward for years, we are just reaching the end of that line. Costs are essentially as low as they can get for SD development. HD costs are going to do nothing but fall. Especially as HD adoption rates continue to skyrocket.
Companies will continue HD development because they have devoted tons of money into it.
Additionally, Wii Third Party proponents act like the Wii has proven itself to sell tons of 'standard' third party software. I mean that chart from several pages ago (With an install base of 40+ million) RE4 only manages to sell 1.66 million? Let's face it, Nintendo is known for their first party titles far more than ANYTHING else on the system and always has been. Thats where most of the sales reside. Thats where most of the interest resides.
Most people don't buy a Nintendo console for it's wide array of third party games. Most people buy a Nintendo console for Mario and Zelda and the whole host of related themed games. This is competition that developers aren't interested in competing with.
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I think we can leave it at that we're not going to reach a consensus on the notion of risk. We can agree, though, that HD game development is where developers have invested their money, and they will likely continue down that path to wherever it leads instead of enduring short term pain and throwing their weight behind the market leader.
As for the other point, Resident Evil 4 is a very poor example, because you're talking about a game that was already two and a half years old and had already been released on three separate systems (GC, PS2, PC) beforehand, and was released to a system that had less than half the userbase of the GC at the time. Besides, if you're talking about aggregate third party sales, they were already selling more on the Wii than the XBox 360 in the US as of last November and December, and this January (as for the other territories, it's pretty much a given in Japan, and we don't have complete data for Europe). I can dig up the links to the NPD responses, but you'll notice that both Nintendo and Microsoft, both sourcing NPD, worded their reports to make that fact clear, with Microsoft stressing things like life to date third party software sales (January 2009), and Nintendo outright stating they sold more third party games for the Wii than any other system (December 2008).
Here's the point: The overall pool for third party dollars on the Wii clearly exists, and at worst, rivals the XBox 360's same pool. Over time, that balance is only going to shift in Nintendo's favour, and it will be up to the third parties to haul their buckets over to that pool. It's not Nintendo's fault if third parties bring leaking coffee mugs instead of buckets.
