Guys.... Kingdom hearts IS a casual RPG game.

Essentially its a childrens story with childrens characters.

Now, it belongs on a console where the most 'children' can enjoy it. Stop being so selfish people, let the kids have their game.

Yeah guys listen to Squilliam's sarcasm and just give it to the Wii, since it's you know a "childrens" game.

It's ok, we understand, since it has Disney adults 'generally' aren't attracted to KH.  It should go right to the Wii no questions asked.  Mhm

and yes I did read Jammy's comment :P

360/ps3

I apologize in advance, but I can not resist the opportunity.





Where's Kingdom Hearts going? Why IT'S GOING TO DISNEYLAND!!!


BWAAA HAAAAAA!!!

^lol

Really is there people still debating this? I thought people would have finally given up on PS3... though it seems people hold true to PS360 now which is highly unlikely...

^^This - It's not even really debateable either. 

The thing is that a lot of the folks who discuss this topic look at the question from the gamer/fanboy lens. But this is a business who wants to make money and you have to keep that in mind and examine the business factors involved here.  Looking at the potential market for the game to sell to is an important part of determining a platform...after all they don't want to make a game that is at a high risk of not producing a reasonable ROI.

One of the best ways to asses potential ROI is to look at the pool of potential customers for a given platform. With a sequel like this we can use historical data to tell us how the game performs in each region.  That information is critical to selecting a platform with with regional strengths suited to your games' strongest markets. 

So to get to that we first have this:

As you can see the EU market is rather insignificant for KH series sales compared to JP which itself is small compared to NA.  Thus the platform chosen needs to be strong in NA and have a solid base in JP. The less important EU market is still a factor, but a much smaller one than NA and JP.

Next we look at market share for the prospective hardware platforms:

First of all the most important market NA shows the 360 with double the PS3's install base and the Wii with triple the PS3 and +50%  over the 360. Second the JP market is dominated by the Wii with about 2.8 times the PS3's install base and  nearly 9 times the X360's.  Finally in Europe the Wii has an 86% and 59% lead over the PS3 and 360 respectively.

But what does all of this translate into?  The short answer/analogy is we are doing the same thing a store like Walmart is doing when it chooses not to supply extreme cold weather clothing to places like Miami.  We are recognizing that certain markets buy certain products and those historical trends have meaning that shouldn't be ignored.  Similarly certain games do good/bad in certain regions and KH is no exception.

The regional columns above just represent summary data, while the WW column is the important piece of information here.  To summarize the Wii represents 54% of the available KH market, while the 360 represents 26%, and the PS3 comes in at 20%.  Even combining the two HD consoles the Wii has a 16% advantage over the combined HD total.

In short, the Wii is far and away the most sound choice for an exclusive launch, but a multiplat HD launch is possible (or potentially even a triple platform multiplat title, but that is far less likely).  For the PS3 the recent subpar holiday sales performance combined with the realities of the current hardware market share and global economic situations dictates that this game will not be a PS3 exclusive. It will be Wii exclusive, PS3/360 multi-plat, or Wii/PS3/360 multi-plat, because neither the PS3 or 360 can justify the development cost by themself without quite a bit of that notorious "moneyhatting".

Of course since we're talking about the business factors I'll also point out the lower development costs and time for the Wii which again magnifies it's hardware advantage as it has a large positive impact on the final ROI achieved.

Conclusion: Companies are in business to make money and assuming that a company will go against that grain just because you have some nostalgia of playing a game on a certain brand of hardware is wishful thinking at best.  Furthermore, the idea that your personal vision of how the game should push graphical technologies will somehow trump the natural instinct for profit are also rather naive.  The bottom line in this case is the bottom line.

Not trying to crush anyone's dream but the fact is that the odds of a KH3 PS3 exclusive are pretty slim.

PS - All of this assumes that KH3 even hits a console.  They could always decide to just go DS since it nearly trumps all three consoles combined.

note: All the weighting is doing is representing the importance of a region to KH sales by using historical KH series market data to assess a weighting which is uniformly applied to all three consoles for that region, this is done in each region and the results are tallied in the WW column of that table to represent the weighted marketshare for the purposes of KH sales.

Well, Sqrl's post made a lot of sense, which the original post did definitely not.

:)

OK, sorry.

I thought your post was a bit funny, because of the graphics/physics/cell parts. Sure, certain consumers do care about that stuff (you obviously do), but the typical KH gamer probably won't. I have to ask: If realism is THAT important to you, how could you ever bear lookin at games when you started in 1997? But we won't be getting anywhere with the graphics discussion, it's the old Wii vs. PS3 debate.

Sqrl made a good point from the business perspective, you have to admit that. So, from the "highest ROI" perspective, I'd agree with Sqrl and say KH3 will be on Wii.

Someone else made a good point, too, though: KH3 is such a high profile title, that it will make a lot of money anyway. So SquareEnix/Disney might choose a different platform, if they feel the KH brand would benefit from that decision. I have no idea what these reasons could be, though.

One thing I am pretty sure of is that it won't be a PSWii60 release. We've seen it before: Multiplatform releases including the Wii only work with games where graphics are absolutely secondary (Guitar Hero, Lego Star Wars). Look at typical "graphics games" (Fifa, Call of Duty): The Wii gets a downgraded spin off nobody buys, because they feel cheated comparing it to the HD originals. If SE make a PSWii60 KH, PS360 will have to be the lead platform - have we ever seen an upgraded Wii game? But in this scenario, the Wii version won't really sell; let's say, 2 Mio on PS360 and 2 Mio on Wii. A Wii exclusive might sell 5 Mio, while being much cheaper in development (I know I am making these numbers up, I'm just trying to make a point).

However, maybe they'll actually skip this generation, if they have no resources left for another high profile game right now.