SavingPrincess said:
You could make Final Fantasy XIII on the Wii if you significantly reduced the graphics... significantly; but the core game remains the same. This is just justification for poor sales and pinning the blame on people outside his department.
...Right. Yes, I suppose you could certainly do that. It would be commercial suicide, but you
could - the Final Fantasy series (which I don't play or have any vested interest in mind you, just to make that clear up front) spent a great deal of time being a Sony exclusive. Fan(boys)s actually
booed when the X-Box version came up at a public event. But even ignoring that silly aspect of the franchise target audience (which is oddly enough partially justified by the real disparity in quality between the two editions of the game thanks to horrible compression on the X-Box in all the cutscenes), if you were going about making the latest Final Fantasy title for the Wii, unless you
only plan to make it for the Wii, you're going to be offering them a product that might as well be subtitled
This is the worst edition[sub]TM[/sub].
This is the problem with a great many would be 'hardcore' projects and the Wii - the X-Box and PS3 are on (roughly) equal footings, hence why a lot of titles throw in maddeningly exclusive bonuses for buying one or the other (which is pretty much like tossing chum into shark infested waters judging by how fanboys react), but if a game comes out for all three current generation consoles, the Wii version pretty much
always gets the short straw. People, gamers included, are shallow - we like shiny things. If you make your game aiming at the hardcore gamer demographic a Wii exclusive, you're still going to be competing with the other console platforms (as the press, other gamers, etc are all going to compare your game to others on those platforms and
yours won't be as shiny) and limiting your potential sales as well because now it's an exclusive title.
True, Sega is covering it's ass because those games, while competent enough, just weren't all that great, but their failure in that arena illustrates the core issue - what the Wii needs aren't just cut-back versions of titles that would normally see release on another platform, because the target audience
are the people who own those other platforms now. It's not enough to make an FPS title that's "good, for a Wii game" like Conduit, the bulk of your existing audience consists of people who own a Wii
but barely ever use it (thanks to the bulk of Wii games being uninspired waggle-fests). A Wii-exclusive FPS that is necessarily not as shiny as the ones on other consoles isn't really going to convince them to plug the Wii back in.
What the hardcore gamer demographic is
really looking for isn't just low-budget clones of the sorts of games they can already play on the other consoles now, but
good 3rd party Wii titles that capitalize on the systems 'gimmick', rather than shitty casual games that exploit it for a cheap buck (which sadly describes most 3rd party titles for the Wii).
There is certainly a market for more mature titles on the Wii, as lots of 'hardcore gamers' own Wiis and would love reasons to actually use them, but a developer looking to create one needs to make something unique and compelling, because you
can't market your title using the "look how shiny it is!" angle so very many games use now, and if it's the exact same type of experience your audience could have on another system only it would look much better, have more enemies on screen at once, etc if it wasn't on the Wii, well that's pretty much doomed to commercial failure from the word go - the Wii has an insane install base in part because large numbers of non-traditional gamers own them, but they're not your market.
If, on the other hand, your development studio likes pushing the graphical envelope and creating titles that test the limits of what the more powerful consoles can render, they probably have no business making games for the Wii - they'll only feel constrained, and their efforts could be better spent making games for those platforms where 'hardcore' titles aren't novelties.
