@Bolded

Ummm no. He got bashed to hell for what he said, and what's worse, Valve came out later and said that the PS3 was a viable platform.

@rest

agreed

Nintendo dropped out of the graphics rat-race and thought about the game console in a completely different way. That is a paradigm shift -- both by Nintendo and within the industry.

The old paradigm was that graphics improvements sold consoles. But the two Gamecubes duct-taped together has outsold the two HD consoles combined since it was released. That means there was a shift in the buying patterns of console users.  People were looking at consoles differently. You have noted as much talking about Nintendo's marketing change.

And a paradigm shift does not necessarily mean that something did not exist before. But that which was once on the fringe is now becoming the majority. That is a paradigm shift (In other words, casuals are outnumbering hardcores).

Mike from Morgantown

@ Pristine20,

Valve has it's own reason for bashing the PS3 and PS3 fans did not praise him for doing so. They attacked his comments and rightly so. Secondly, Id makes first person shooters. The Wii controller is Ideal for this type of game and the controll scheme has already been developed, Metroid Prime 3, and tweeked, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and is in the process of being tweeked further with the Conduit.

Yes, the main difference between HD development costs and SD dev costs is labour. That includes all the labour that goes into HD development tools and engines. The best example I've seen of skyrocketing HD costs is Polyphony talking about how it takes one designer an entire day to make a headlight, a month to model a car, IIRC.

If you assume Wii games are 1/3 the cost of similar HD games, and take an example of a developer shifting from full HD development to full Wii development (for the record, I think the smart thing to do is diversify), the developer can do one of two things: Produce the same number of games and slash the workforce by 2/3 to reduce costs, or keep costs the same and release three times the number of games. Both require a period of restructuring as you either decide who gets the axe or who fills the positions for each of three teams.

Obviously, any gamer would prefer the second choice, since it triples the number of games we get to choose from. Realistically, too much money is being lost right now, and companies need to downsize a little. Even with the strong and steady growth of the gaming market, publishers have over-invested, and need to scale things back.

Not to play devil's advocate, but if you actually read the entire interview, that's not what he says. Big quotation follows (bold is mine):

"Now, maybe it's just that we don't know how to exploit it, and Nintendo does because they made the Wii, and they're really that good. And I'm not trying to take away from those guys at Nintendo. Their games are awesome--I'm a fan, too. But as a company that doesn't make Nintendo-type games, the Wii is less of a compelling platform for us to really sink a lot of resources into.

So somebody needs to demonstrate that there's going to be buyers out there that actually would show up and buy the games on the Wii. Even if we make an awesome game, there's still a question as to whether we're going to justify our investment. And also, I mean, if you look at the market, the type of games we traditionally make, those games are selling record numbers on non-Wii platforms. But despite the success of the Wii, and the fact that it's the largest-selling console out there, games like we make are still doing bigger numbers than they've ever done before.

So that doesn't give us a lot of cause to be worried about the Wii. We celebrate it, we love the Wii, but it's not for the type of games we make. I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that almost every company doesn't try to be all things to all people. Nintendo isn't trying to be all things to all people either. They have a great console with the Wii, they make great games. But they're really not trying to push the graphics envelope. They're doing other things.

So I think sometimes you have to figure out where you're going to make your bets and then go for it, as opposed to trying to do everything at once. Because the concern would be for us, especially as an independent developer, is that we place too many bets and our attention is spread out all over the place. We're making a focused, measured bet that says, "We really are confident that this is going to pay off." And that's what we've done with Rage. John's made technology that is cross-platform, we've made a game that we feel like we can deliver on console controllers just as easily as on keyboard and mouse. That's what we're going for."

In particular I think that the last paragraph validates what I said before about developers not seeing the Wii market as a financial safe haven as some of you think, and simply choosing which risks to take because of what they want to do or what they feel they are good at doing.

I might appear petulant, but no.

That's sloppy wording using a term that has a precise scientific meaning. It does not mean simply looking at things differently, and it does not mean finding lateral solutions to problems. I hate quoting Wikipedia but:

"In the later part of the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as a buzzword, popularized as marketing speak and appearing more frequently in print and publication.^[6] In his book, Mind The Gaffe, author Larry Trask advises readers to refrain from using it, and to use caution when reading anything that contains the phrase. It is referred to in several articles and books^[7][8] as abused and overused to the point of becoming meaningless."

I read the entire article this morning and I knew it was going to cause a shitstorm on here. The guy is right and he was very respectful in everything he said yet there are still people that find a problem with him and what was said.

In those parts he's talking about id's business, but certainly not in the quotes the OP highlighted.

Indeed. But even the parts that I bolded were not about strictly id, but about any third party that develops the same types of games, very different from Nintendo's in his own words.

He's not saying that third parties can't make good business by developing on the Wii. Those who adhere to Nintendo's formulas and to licensed/casual gaming ususally do, he says. But there are no precedents of great successes for the kind of game id do, while there are on the other consoles.

It looks like reasonable risk assessment based on existing sales data, instead of wishful thinking.

You could lament that it's an egg and chicken problem, but frankly that's not up to id to prove or disprove theories about possible reception of games on the Wii platform. That's something that Nintendo should have done years ago, cultivating the third party ecosystem in the beginning.

They didn't, maybe they were never interested in pushing the platform as really diversified in genres. But still, it's their platform: Sony and Microsoft did what they needed to do to have a variegated lineup. With first party titles, with financed exclusives, by developing infrastructures and engines, by helping studios with their own experts.

Nintendo only said: here's the platform. Take or leave. Well, I own a Wii but I can't place the blame squarely on the shoudlers of the third party developers for not wanting to jump in the dark.

The iD guys are still pissed with Nintendo about how they were treated during the SNES days, when Nintendo was under different management. It's not surprising to hear someone working for them to say this. Also, why hype a console that you can't sell a game engine for? Diss what you don't offer and talk up the products that you can sell tools for.