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3rd Parties & Wii
LibrarianThorne
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This thread is for discussion on the state of third party companies and Nintendo's Wii.
Just to get this out of the way first: I do like the Wii. I like Nintendo's forthrightness in system design and the new gameplay oppurtunities that creates. I love that the Wii is growing the video game market.
That last sentence there is important. Is Nintendo growing the video game market, or growing the Nintendo market? There's a lot of similarities between Nintendo and Disney in this regard. People don't buy a Nintendo console (or at least haven't, for hte past two generations) for Capcom games, or Square-Enix games. They buy a Wii, or bought a Gamecube, for the Nintendo games.
Let's think back to the N64. A lot of the system's classics weren't developed by Nintendo (second party companies like Rare and third party devs like Yuke's). Now, let's go to the Gamecube. The only games that spring to mind as big hits on the system that came from a 3rd party is Resident Evil 4. Now of course there's mitigating factors like the GC's relatively poor sales (though honestly any console that doesn't lose money is a success) but in general the 3rd parties weren't present on the Gamecube to any real extent.
Now, Nintendo's got the Wii. Darling of these forums and, it would seem, most of the western world. I've been gaming for a long, long time and I can't recall anything like the insanity of the Wii sales. But, and this is important, let's look at who exactly is buying the Wii. You've got the Nintendo die-hards, the crowd that ate up the Gamecube and play Smash Brothers whenever there's half a chance to do so. You've got the parents buying a "kid-friendly" system, however parents are also buying this machine for themselves. Anyone can figure out Wii Sports and Wii Play. Nintendo's essentially selling the concept of outdoor activity with some activity and none of the outdoors. Now, let's consider what games these new gamers will purchase. RPGs and FPSes are rather complicated and not very intuitive even with the Wiimote. Puzzle games are a big hit with this older crowd, but would any of them pay $50 for an experience they can get on Yahoo? Sports games like Madden, too, are fairly opaque to the uninitated, and let's not even get started on fighting games (I really have no idea what the hell ARC is thinking releasing Guilty Gear XX Accent Core on the Wii).
So, the third party companies are left stumped. Wii Sports and Wii Play are fun, don't get me wrong, but there's only so many gimmick games you can make until the gimmick itself is worn out. No one wants to guess when that will occur. Similarly, the days of three-console releases are dead and gone. The Wii isn't playing in the same ballpark as the 360 and PS3, hell, it's not even in the same county. Devs mostly just don't want to spend the cash to develop essentially two games to get a multiplatform release, not to mention gameplay needs to be very different from the 360/PS3 games to get a Wii owner's attention. Spider-Man 3, to the best of my knowledge, sold poorly on the Wii and Activision had to suck all that development cash that sales didn't make up for.
This is the answer to the question, why aren't third party companies flocking to the Wii? The Wii, as gangbusters as it's been doing, doesn't eclipse the market of the 360/PS3. Your average Wii owner will not purchase as many games as will your average 360/PS3 owner.
I'm fully willing to admit i may be incorrect in a lot of these assumptions, but what I want to do is get people talking about this. I can't think of any other era of gaming where devs have been so loathe to jump onto a bandwagon, especiall one as insane as Nintendo's is right now.
Just to get this out of the way first: I do like the Wii. I like Nintendo's forthrightness in system design and the new gameplay oppurtunities that creates. I love that the Wii is growing the video game market.
That last sentence there is important. Is Nintendo growing the video game market, or growing the Nintendo market? There's a lot of similarities between Nintendo and Disney in this regard. People don't buy a Nintendo console (or at least haven't, for hte past two generations) for Capcom games, or Square-Enix games. They buy a Wii, or bought a Gamecube, for the Nintendo games.
Let's think back to the N64. A lot of the system's classics weren't developed by Nintendo (second party companies like Rare and third party devs like Yuke's). Now, let's go to the Gamecube. The only games that spring to mind as big hits on the system that came from a 3rd party is Resident Evil 4. Now of course there's mitigating factors like the GC's relatively poor sales (though honestly any console that doesn't lose money is a success) but in general the 3rd parties weren't present on the Gamecube to any real extent.
Now, Nintendo's got the Wii. Darling of these forums and, it would seem, most of the western world. I've been gaming for a long, long time and I can't recall anything like the insanity of the Wii sales. But, and this is important, let's look at who exactly is buying the Wii. You've got the Nintendo die-hards, the crowd that ate up the Gamecube and play Smash Brothers whenever there's half a chance to do so. You've got the parents buying a "kid-friendly" system, however parents are also buying this machine for themselves. Anyone can figure out Wii Sports and Wii Play. Nintendo's essentially selling the concept of outdoor activity with some activity and none of the outdoors. Now, let's consider what games these new gamers will purchase. RPGs and FPSes are rather complicated and not very intuitive even with the Wiimote. Puzzle games are a big hit with this older crowd, but would any of them pay $50 for an experience they can get on Yahoo? Sports games like Madden, too, are fairly opaque to the uninitated, and let's not even get started on fighting games (I really have no idea what the hell ARC is thinking releasing Guilty Gear XX Accent Core on the Wii).
So, the third party companies are left stumped. Wii Sports and Wii Play are fun, don't get me wrong, but there's only so many gimmick games you can make until the gimmick itself is worn out. No one wants to guess when that will occur. Similarly, the days of three-console releases are dead and gone. The Wii isn't playing in the same ballpark as the 360 and PS3, hell, it's not even in the same county. Devs mostly just don't want to spend the cash to develop essentially two games to get a multiplatform release, not to mention gameplay needs to be very different from the 360/PS3 games to get a Wii owner's attention. Spider-Man 3, to the best of my knowledge, sold poorly on the Wii and Activision had to suck all that development cash that sales didn't make up for.
This is the answer to the question, why aren't third party companies flocking to the Wii? The Wii, as gangbusters as it's been doing, doesn't eclipse the market of the 360/PS3. Your average Wii owner will not purchase as many games as will your average 360/PS3 owner.
I'm fully willing to admit i may be incorrect in a lot of these assumptions, but what I want to do is get people talking about this. I can't think of any other era of gaming where devs have been so loathe to jump onto a bandwagon, especiall one as insane as Nintendo's is right now.
LibrarianThorne on
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Third party companies are flocking to the Wii. They're just late to the party, as it were, since everybody expected the PS3 to once again take this generation handily.
Seriously... we have someone like you every week complaining about the lack of third party games on the Wii. Just give it some fucking time already.
Nongamers (ie, people who wouldn't have purchased a video game system before the Wii) don't distinguish between first and third party games like so called "hardcore" gamers will, sales of shovelware on all systems prove this.
Success with conventional gamers (the ones who own everything and post on gaming related forums, you know who you are) boils down to the amount of effort third party devs put into their games. Sure, we're going to buy the Wii for Nintendo games. But the DS shows a growing trend (at least for me, who is in the traditional sense a "Nintendo gamer") of purchasing third party games.
Edit: And as Bionic Monkey points out, the games are on their way. The Wii took the world by storm, catching all the third parties (except for Ubisoft, to their credit) off guard.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
*I'm saying not it's wrong to be looking forward to RE:UC or anything, but it's pretty much an objective truth that it is NOTHING compared to RE5/equivalent in the eyes of most.
And as for Spiderman 3, a shit game will bomb no matter what console it's released on.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
This thread reeks of the standard Wii stealth troll stench on neogaf. You get a few sentences of "i love the wii"/"wii is awesome" and then goes on at length to say why the wii is only for nintendo fanboys and non-gamers . With the conclusion the that the wii like all other nintendo systems (since portable systems and anything before the N64 don't count) will never get anything more than token 3rd party support.
Yeah, this is like that.
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These systems (N64 and GCN) weren't any where near the market leader either.
Prime 3 is selling about equal to Bioshock, based on last NPD numbers. There is a large hardcore audience on the system. Also, look at million+ sales of Zelda and Red Steel.
Nintendo even held a conference at some point and said that the 'expanded market' is very small compared to traditional gamers with the Wii.
As for Arc, they have no other options. They cannot afford to release a niche game on the PS3/360, and they have already put the game out on PS2. The Wii is a great way to go. The only alternative might be downloadable services, but I think they'd exceed the size limit of XBL and PS3 users may or may not have BC for the GG games.. d'no.
How about this. The Wii also attracts gamers who are into the kind of gameplay you get from the Virtual Console (arcade style games). This was SNK's reasoning for supporting the Wii initially. They even had a poll, and most of their users' responses said that they preferred Wii support to the other systems. Perhaps Arc is thinking along similar lines?
If you'd been following the news, you'd realise they have.
but guess what? game development takes an average of 2 years. They cannot be "on the fence" about the Wii until its release, notice that the system is selling well, analyze the data, come up with a game concept, flesh it out, code it, test it, gold it, market it, print it, and distribute it in under a single year, if it's going to be a 'classic.'
The devs are coming. Third parties were just caught with their pants down. Just like the DS.
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You get a lot of anecdotal accounts of parents, grandparents and retirement homes buying them, just in regards to the senior demographic.
As for gamers... Look at the NES and the SNES. Many of their best games were made by third parties. The only reason that changed is because Nintendo consoles lost strong third party support, so they didn't get many good third party games. Simple as that. The Wii is already winning the favor of third parties again, which means they'll invest more money into making better games that will sell just as well as first party ones.
While I can't positively say 100% that Ninty has expanded the audience, I can say this though:
Boogie charted in the console top 20 for NPD as well as several top 20 for EU charts.
Anecdotal evidence from Amazon and Bestbuy puts Carnival Games as one of the best-selling games.
Of course, a big mistake people make with these games is put them in the same category as traditional game sales. Since these games are targeted heavily towards casuals, I expect a slow burn sales rather than the usual frontloaded sales for traditional games.
Regarding whether Wii owners buy games as much as owners of PS3/X360 - do you consider most of PS2 owners as the regular PS3/360 owners?
Most PS2 owners are either casual gamers who buys very few games in a year or the regular sports-only gamers who buy the yearly iteration of Madden.
At this point the 360 seems to have the regular sports-only gamers while the Wii has the casual gamers, although Madden 07 Wii and Tiger Woods 07 Wii sales seem to indicate a pretty healthy presence of sports gamers for the Wii.
XBL Gametag: mailarde
Screen Digest LOL3RZZ
They did a couple of things:
* They thought the Wii was going to be third place so devoted very little resources to Wii development
* If not above then they didn't even bother starting Wii game development until everyone saw the MAD rushes to play the wii at the game shows before its release.
As others have said it takes a minimum of two years to develop a game nowadays, what's happening with the Wii happened with the DS. All the big name developers put their money on the PSP and they got caught with their pants down.
Sometimes I can't help but think the kind of people who post this stuff are damn MS/Sony shills.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Perhaps it's fair to say it is a bit overdone, though.
What are the differences between the Wii and DS situations?
The only difference I can see is that it will take longer for developers to make Wii games since you've got to make more textures, more sounds, more detailed levels etc.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Edit: I'm not saying it's unlikely that we'll see an explosion of support, but when people look at upcoming games lists and see nothing much of interest in the third party camp, well, it's perfectly understandable to be concerned. "Just wait for it" isn't enough.
I think it's pretty much the same type of people as those during N64-Saturn-PS1 era who thought that PS1 was going to kill off traditional gaming at the time.
XBL Gametag: mailarde
Screen Digest LOL3RZZ
In the mean time, I'm happy enjoying Metroid in September, Galaxies in November, and Brawl forever.
Most of those don't affect the sales that much. I haven't seen any evidence that backwards compatibility played a significant role in making the DS popular. The price is still less than the competition. And the competition is now Sony and Microsoft, both of which the Wii is outselling by a good deal just like the DS outsold the PSP by a large amount.
1. Regaining third-party support after two (arguably) lackluster console generations is not easy, even when you're the fastest selling game console in the history of ever.
2. People complain that Nintendo consoles are purchased for Nintendo games. Well... Nintendo games are easily among the best produced. So if you can ONLY get them on the one system, why shouldn't you get that system for those games? I mean, people buy 360s for Bioshock, Halo, Gears of War, and such because they're exclusive to the system (PCs don't count for the purposes of this argument).
I mean, is there something wrong with buying a system for Twilight Princess, Prime 3, Strikers, Brawl, and Mario Galaxy? It's not Nintendo's fault that the other companies can't compete with them from a quality perspective.
You want to know what they're doing? They're allowing me the privelege of paying them money in exchange for fun.
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Why wouldn't they make quality games? Quality games sell no matter what the system is. Crappy DS games didn't prevent Sonic and other great games from being made by third parties for the Wii. If a console outsells the competition, I see no reason why third parties will continue to publish crap for it while only putting the good games on the consoles that haven't sold as well. If this didn't happen with the PS, PS2, and DS, I don't see why it should happen with the Wii.
Edit: Also, although a lot of people HATE the argument, there is some truth to Nintendo games taking way sales from third parties. I myself am planning on getting Smash Bros and Mario Galaxy only for my Wii this winter, and I there are other games I'm interested at all in-it's just that I, and everyone else, can only spend so much on games, and games like these will take top priority. There's a good chance this trend will continue down the line.
Anyways, you say that as though it's a bad thing. Taking a DS example, Capcom hasn't even bothered to throw touch-screen controls on a couple of GBA ports and they're still really fucking epic.
Also the vast majority of waggle I've played has been boring trash.
I'm sure it can change but, good lord, half the Wii titles have been Yahoo style Flash games with waggle controls.
Scurge: Hive and a few other games were ports of GBA games with some touch screen controls added.
You could say the exact same thing with Halo, Uncharted, Eye of Judgement, Gran Turismo, Rare's games, etc.
Then you've been playing the wrong Wii games.
The Bigs, Godfather, Bust a Move, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell (a PS2 game with thrown on waggle, really), Tomb Raider, DBZ fighters, Far Cry, LEGO Star Wars...do I really need to keep on listing? I could go on and on.
I'm trying to keep it to notable, possibly purchase worthy games too. There is nothing that wrong with a lot these games, but one has to admit it is a somewhat unfortunate trend. Just pointing at stuff on menu/for aiming doesn't add that much to a game, I want good stuff that couldn't have been done before. Yes, there are few such games...but they're pretty much all Nintendo games.
The 360 has Gun, King Kong, Godfather, Bully, Guitar Hero, Hitman: Blood Money, Lego Star Wars, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Stuntman, etc.
what are the right wii games
zelda, mario, super smash brothers, and metroid prime 3
that's about it
To be fair, Zelda is a port.
I haven't played smash brothers or mario, but Prime 3 is really, really good. Warioware is also a lot of fun, but I prefer the DS version. Most of the third party shit is just that, though.
+ ExciteTruck, WarioWare
Zelda
Excite Truck
Super Paper Mario
Sonic & Secret Rings(it's okay)
Resident Evil 4
Mario Strikers
WarioWare
Trauma Center
Metroid Prime 3
None of which are "boring trash" or "Yahoo style Flash games"... I already owned RE4 on the Cube and RE4:Wii is heaps better just because of the controls.
All first party games or ports. Doesn't really say much about the quality, or lack thereof, of third party titles.
Sonic and the Secret Rings is not a port. Elebits is also good.
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