The operative thing being the Wii gets cheap, low-effort games so it doesn't matter when they inevitably fail to sell much numbers-wise. This hardly indicates developer confidence. They don't benefit from a two-tier system, and the third-party games putting out colossal sales figures all have one thing in common; they're not on the Wii.Evan Waters said:Or they can just develop good exclusives. I think developers are starting to develop an interesting sort of two-tier system here, making "main" games for the PS3 and XBox 360, with spin-off titles for the Wii. The Wii gets Umbrella Chronicles, the others get RE5, and so on.
The last generation, and all the ones before it. Odd consoles out always get shafted by developers because it's expensive developing a whole other game just for one market section. Hence, the Wii gets lumped in with the PS2 to offset risk.Evan Waters said:Really, all this means is that you can't rely on the same "everything is portable to everything else" mentality as in the last generation, which is not so terrible. If we're going to have different consoles they may as well provide different experiences, not minor variations on the same software.
Lest we forget, the best-selling console of all time is the PS2, and the games that got it to that position of ridiculous supremacy over competitors were all third-party titles. Consoles are reliant on third-party sales, and disregarding them will result in a console with a few shining stars you made surrounded by trash hucked there by people who don't care, while all the big developers stay well clear and stick with companies that don't have a reputation for costly and needless meddling with third-party output. Both the N64 and Gamecube lost out enormously due to a lack of third-party support, while the PS1 and PS2 flourished due to an abundance of it. A console sales strategy that discounts the value of third parties is going to work out badly for the people who buy that console and find that outside a handful of self-published games there's a huge wasteland of sod-allness where the software library should be.Evan Waters said:And honestly, this is just a good business strategy. You cannot be reliant on other companies for your success- the weird exclusivity wars that Microsoft and Sony are waging over major third party titles is not good for gamers, as the R2 Ghostbusters issue shows.
Nintendo are risking backing themselves into the same dead end Atari did back in the 80s, surrounded by companies just looking to cash in on the large Wii market with no real knowledge of how to actually make a videogame. The fact that they don't seem to give a damn what third parties do because they make money just from people buying the console doesn't bode well for the machine's long-term prospects.