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Video game industry thread: late August is done, go to the new one
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The Wii has had a bit of a change with the arrival of Monster hunter 3 and the new dragon quest x will be a wii exclusive. Which shows a sign of things changing with 3rd party support. Its not amazing or anything but it at least shows a different approach compared to the gamecube where everything exclusive outside of nintendo was ported over.
Little King's Story, Silent Hill: SH, Sin and Punishment 2, Zak and Wiki, Boy and His Blob, HotD : Overkill, Mad World, both No More Heroes, Dead Space Extraction, Boy and His Blob, Muramasa...
None of those were lazy ports. The problem is that no-one bought them, including most of you.
Well yeah, you know id (Tom Hall, Carmack and Romero) developed a Super Mario Bros 3 PC port back when they were just starting out, right? They pitched it to Nintendo and everything, then when Nintendo said no, they changed it into Commander Keen.
Yeah, you show that asshole. How dare he not develop on the Nintendo systems.
I don't consider Monster Hunter to be proof of fantastic support from Capcom. The decision probably weighed heavily on the fact that HD art assets for a game on the scale of Monster Hunter would have been prohibitively expensive and at the time PS3 didn't have the install base to recoup the cost. Wii, on the other hand, would be cheaper because they could reuse a lot of PSP assets. The rest of Capcom's offerings do not point to them having much intent to support Wii.
I'll agree that Dragon Quest X is great for Wii, but it's one of the few gems left to look forward to.
I'm glad you agree. ;-)
Really though, I'm mainly annoyed with his bullshit excuses. It's the same old story. Developers make a half assed effort, half assed effort doesn't sell and everyone uses that as proof that games on Wii can't sell. You can only get back what you put in to something.
I have before taken the stance that the 3rd party situation doesnt necessarily need to change. One can approach it from another side - At the current unprecedented rate that developers/publishers are going out of business/consolidating, Nintendo doesnt really need to do anything. If you dont want to make money, thats basically your problem, not Nintendo's. There is something noble to be said about making the game you want to make even if your company is dead meat.
I do agree with you here, and I believe like others has said that successful 3rd party Wii titles happen because of quality and sufficient advertising. I think the problem for nintendo and these 3rd parties is image and how the industry shows the Wii. It always ends up being negative comments about how some game bombed so we will never make Wii games or Wii isn't powerful enough to run our engine despite us running the same thing on an Ipod touch.
You touched on something I was thinking about. If a developer says that they're not making their game on the Wii because it doesn't have the graphics or horsepower to accomplish their vision, ok I can respect that. But don't turn around and put the game on the iPhone! Capcom did this with Street Fighter 4. Oh great, we did get Tatsunoko vs Capcom, a game that has no chance in hell of selling huge numbers and will inevitably be used as an excuse not to make fighting games on Wii.
someone get a shovel.
It's not like neglecting third parties has ever bitten then in the arse before. And hell, platform loyalty will ensure that every console venture after this one will be just as successful right?
They're stuck in a situation where they have to always be innovating the fuck out of everything. At the same time, HD remains a non-viable business model for every entity involved. They're facing two competitors who for some reason, dont need to make money and basically wont for the forseeable future. Like 10 years+
This is not a downhill race for them.
You listed Boy and His Blob twice and I think S&P2 is techically a "2nd party" game, if not straight up Nintendo.
And while these games are great, they aren't the 3rd party exclusives that the system needed. A lot are niche games from no-name studios, and the ones that aren't had other flaws.
I could list off some others that did things pretty well (Red Steel 2) but there wouldn't be much point.
By the way, I searched Metacritic for Mad World and the thing that popped up was a trailer for Gears of War. o_O
Uh, they haven't neglected third parties at all, they've courted them better than ever before. They've given tons of information about the Wii, about its audience and how to develop for it, they made their console the easiest to develop for and provided middleware for developing Wii remote gestures, etc. etc.
The only thing they haven't done is throw money at third parties like MS and Sony. Unless you mean "neglected" as "they didn't moneyhat," they've done a great job.
I was thinking of the Unreal 3 engine and that Rage game recently shown off. I personally think the worst is Resident Evil 5 is basically a HD resident evil 4 with co-op mode there is little reason why with a little effort Capcom could have ported it to the Wii.
Uh, by quite a few accounts, Nintendo's middleware, documentation and developer support are piss poor compared to MS and Sony's. I think I can remember someone from Factor 5 saying that they still used some of their (Factor 5's) old Rogue Leader code in their middleware.
I've brought this up a couple of times but Nintendo really should've bought out Factor 5 when they had the chance, if only to provide development tools for third parties. Sure the design of their games was stuck in the 90's but they were still a really great studio on the technical side of things.
Personally I don't want the developers for Id or Bethesda making Wii games. I don't mind if Bethesda publishes Wii games but I want their developers working on the next massive RPG.
Also, whatever support third parties were going to give the Wii has been decided. It is too far into this generation for publishers to start doing more now with the Wii. Just like the 3DS we'll probably hear the names of a bunch of popular games from big publishers when Nintendo announces Wii Next.
Factor 5 was paid for their support of the Gamecube (and by extension, the Wii -- the N64 -> Wii are all built on the same graphics architecture, upgraded over the years). That isn't a negative. Having seen the Gamecube documentation, I can assure you that it was out there and they tried their damndest to make things approachable. This is more than can be said for the PS2 or PS3 at launch.
In fact, the core problem lies right there: Nintendo uses a different architecture for its CPU and GPU, which emphasizes different strengths. It's akin to the PowerPC Mac vs. Intel architecture -- in fact, it's almost exactly the same, as Nintendo's CPU is made by IBM. The difference is that Epic never bothered to port the Unreal Engine to Nintendo's system, because they didn't pay Epic to. And because the biggest Middleware engines aren't on Nintendo, developers have to work more to port, and thus make less money. Games that were designed from the ground up for Nintendo's architecture look amazing.
To a lesser degree, the PS3 has the same problem. The difference is A) It's Sony, so people tried anyways, and
The gaming industry is moving more and more towards Middleware being the most important factor in success, to keep costs down. If anyone would take the time to get UE3 working on the Wii without requiring developers to heavily rebuild their shaders, then we'd be golden. But this is just my view.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
You missed the dickwolves raping everyone.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4311300/video-game-lets-you-be-the-taliban/
EA should send a thank you letter to Fox for the free advertising.
At any rate. Did we ever get an analysis of why the 360 sales were so high? I'm curious what proportion of it was just plain excitement over the slimmer model and what, if any, were from people figuring it would be a good chance to trade up to a (hopefully) less RROD-prone model.
'World War II: That's not based on real people.'
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Does that count has Holocaust Denial?
'From a certain point of view.'
Do not engage the Watermelons.
... That was a typo but I decided to let it stand.
In any case, maybe the new 360 model just was popular and that's all there is to it. No secret, no underpinning reason. Just... people flocked to it.
Or maybe it was just the 360 S... nah, mind control socks is definitely more plausible.
I'm glad I missed that.
Must have been an especially slow news day and they hadn't booked the Hooters girls.
Seriously, from the glimpses I catch of Fox in the morning at the gym it's amazing how often they have Hooters girls on.
In defense of the goof in that clip, he wasn't necessarily harsh on it at all. It's almost like even he is tired of demonising shit and just played the straight man so the concerned citizen could spout off and they could move onto the next segment.
Though, I have no idea what their continuing coverage was like.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Eh, obviously it would have done better had the movie done really well, but I don't think the game is down and out. The costs for the movie and the costs for the game are far different as well as I think its actually easier to advertise a nerd game than a nerd movie.
Especially a game that has a two week exclusive period on a single system. Whatever the numbers, given the general appreciation for XBLA content, sales would be expected to increase.
The movie? Well, some things can't be helped.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
The main difference is not the CPU but the GPU. Nintendo uses their own proprietary pixel/vertex shading system (the texture environment unit, known as TEV coupled with "Indirect Texturing") while Sony's using OpenGL's standard pixel/vertex shading (so is the iPhone by the way) and Microsoft's using DirectX's standard pixel/vertex shading. That means there's a higher level of learning for the graphics stuff on the Wii than there is on the other consoles (assuming you didn't develop for the GC that is). It's also why UE3's not on it: not because "the Wii doesn't have [shaders]" but because they didn't and still don't want to do the work to make it work with the Wii's unique shader architecture.
Basically Nintendo needs to bite the bullet next console iteration and go with OpenGL or else they'll continue alienating 3rd parties who would rather shit out something after reading through the docs for a day instead of actually learning how the system works and trying their hardest.
I heard a rumor that Nintendo is using a different company to design the GPU for the 3DS, is that confirmed? And more importantly, does anyone know what kind of architecture it will be using? I know that handheld hardware isn't comparable with console hardware, but still... They shouldn't make it excessively difficult to program for.
Of course Factor 5 were paid for their work, I somehow doubt they'd let Nintendo keep it otherwise. And I'd say it IS a negative when Nintendo are still relying on out-dated code for a less powerful system.
And to add to what Opty said, Sony and Microsoft are constantly updating and evolving their devkits and development tools. I've seen little evidence of Nintendo doing the same, outside of just providing tools for new pieces of hardware (like the Balance Board and Motion+). Neither Sony or Nintendo are ever going to be as good as Microsoft in this space but that doesn't mean they can't try. Sony for example, released an entire multiplatform game engine for free to licensed developers.
Outside of Bethesda cockblocking third parties from getting some of id Tech 5, not much happened. Oh and apparently Carmack is a total asshole because he isn't a Nintendo fanboy.
bawkbawkboo1: You mean the rumour that they were using the nVidia Tegra? It was false, though Nintendo still don't seem to have released specific specs for the system. I still find it hard to believe it's meant to be coming out in just a handful of months.
Found the link to what I was thinking of, I might have remembered it wrong, but there it is.
EDIT: Looking at it again, the article seems to oddly merge the topics of stereoscopic 3D and shaders. I know it has to produce two different images from slightly different angles, but why do they keep linking that with hardware shaders etc?