Space Jawa said:
UltimatheChosen said:
This is the reason why the Wii failed for hardcore gamers last generation-- even though there was a lot of interesting stuff you could do with motion controls, anything that used those motion controls in a meaningful way was incompatible with PCs and the other two consoles. It wasn't worth the money to make Wii games, and thus the bulk of the big releases were Nintendo games. The Wii did get some third-party support, sure, but it paled in comparison to PCs and the other consoles in that same period.
And yet, in spite of failing the "hardcore", the Wii still managed to beat out both the 360 and PS3.
This is largely because the Wii tapped into the casual market. It sold a lot of units, but with the Wii U, we're seeing that it's not a sustainable business model. The people that bought the Wii aren't buying the Wii U, and a lot of the Wiis that were sold ended up gathering dust after a month or two of use. To that audience, the Wii was a novelty, nothing more.
CriticKitten said:
UltimatheChosen said:
Halo 1 was released on the PC.
Er, you do realize that's because PCs are Microsoft products, right? So it's still a Microsoft exclusive? XD
You do realize that it's possible to run Halo on computers without Windows, right?
CriticKitten said:
And it's worth noting that Nintendo (arguably) has more exclusive IPs of consistently high quality than any other company. Even the less respected Mario games like Super Mario Sunshine are still really good games.
Then suck up your pride and buy the console.
Nintendo isn't the only one to do this, but they are the poster boy for it.
Doesn't matter, it's their right as a business to decide what products to offer and how to offer them.
Pride? Try practicality. Like I said, I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a console so that I can play a few games-- the games themselves are expensive enough as it is, and I don't have enough income to justify spending that much on so few games.
I really want to play those games, but there are other games that I really want to play as well, and I can get dozens of them for the price of a console.
Nintendo can do whatever they want. I never said otherwise, so I'm really not sure where you're getting that impression. What I said was that they
should release their stuff on multiple platforms.
CriticKitten said:
Sure I do, because the stuff that every console is doing is stupid, too. These companies are making games, intentionally limiting their audience, and then losing money hand-over-fist because sales need to be astronomically high to recoup development budgets.
Pure speculation. There's no hard evidence to suggest that Nintendo games would "make money "hand-over-fist" on a Sony console, or vice versa, beyond your own personal tastes.
There's plenty of evidence, however, that numerous multi-platform games have seen much poorer sales on one console than another. It's more accurate to state that most multi-platform games tend to sell significantly better on one particular console over all others. And when there's a guaranteed net cost for release on a particular console, it doesn't encourage the developers to spend money on all those discs if they won't sell enough to make sales on that console profitable.
Yes, that's exactly what's fueling it. That, and people who don't want to buy any console, but still want to play the games on a PC.
And as I said before, that's tough luck. It's their product to distribute as they see fit. Either suck up your pride and buy their console, or "miss out".
I will miss out. And so will a lot of other people. And so will Nintendo, because they're locking out a ton of their fans.
"Three distinct consoles" simply will not happen, because there won't be enough third-party support. We're already seeing the industry buckle under its own weight-- as I noted above, budgets are so large that games need to see tons of copies just to break even. No publisher is going to put that kind of money into a game that's tailor-made for a console that not everyone has.
Considering that this is already what happens on all three consoles (companies pouring millions of dollars a year into exclusive titles), it's safe to say that you're wrong on this count.
This is the reason why the Wii failed for hardcore gamers last generation-- even though there was a lot of interesting stuff you could do with motion controls, anything that used those motion controls in a meaningful way was incompatible with PCs and the other two consoles. It wasn't worth the money to make Wii games, and thus the bulk of the big releases were Nintendo games. The Wii did get some third-party support, sure, but it paled in comparison to PCs and the other consoles in that same period.
No, the reason it failed with hardcore gamers was because it was never going for them in the first place. The console was advertised right from the start as a family console.
That, however, is an entirely different issue from why it failed to provide third-party games....and the REAL reason why that fell through is because Nintendo tried to force developers to insert motion controls into their games whether they wanted to or not. That's where the sneering reference to the console's "token Wiimote waggle" came from: Nintendo essentially told devs that if they wanted to put out games on their console, they HAD to insert at least one use of the motion controls. Devs responded to this in the opposite way that Nintendo expected, by simply not releasing games on the Wii.[/quote]
That's actually part of the point I was making-- the Wii was, inarguably, the most distinct and unique console of its generation. But most games simply couldn't take advantage of it, so developers making "mainstream" games looked at the userbase and decided that it wasn't worth porting their game to a system where most of the userbase was made up of casual gamers that probably wouldn't buy the game.
Basically, the Wii failed because it wasn't compatible, and compatibility is huge because it expands your game library. The PS3 had issues as well, but it was, at least, capable of running pretty much any Xbox 360 game if the dev team took the time to port it.
CriticKitten said:
I'm a fan of Nintendo's games, and I'd buy them, but I'm not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a console so that I can play the six or seven games that interest me over the next five to ten years. And that goes for every console.
Then I guess you'll have to "miss out". You're not making a compelling argument for why a company which creates a product should be MANDATED to make that product available to their competitors. "It makes them more money" isn't necessarily true (and it means their competitors get a significant cut of any profits that would have been made anyways).
Mandate? What? I didn't say that they
have to do it. I said that they should, and that it would benefit them.
Successful platform specific releases tend to succeed despite their exclusive nature, not because of it.
And it's not just the current gen games that should be cross-platform. If Nintendo released, say, the NES and SNES Mario games on the PC, I think they'd see a
ton of sales. That goes for the back catalog of a lot of these companies, and porting those games doesn't even take a whole lot of effort.
