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Are Game Publishers Late To the (Wii and DS) Game?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Aug 30, 2007 02:33 PM
from the better-late-than-never dept.
from the better-late-than-never dept.
simoniker writes "A new 'Analyze This' feature on Gamasutra examines analysts' views on the rise of Nintendo's Wii and DS, and how well game publishers have reacted to it, with Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter commenting: 'It's hard to criticize anyone for putting too much faith in the PS3, as most [publishers] haven't created "cutting edge" titles yet for that platform. Most of the PS3 titles so far have been perennial titles, like Madden, Tony Hawk, etc ... I'd say that most failed to capitalize on the DS and Wii opportunity. The exception on the DS side is THQ, which has made every game it can for the platform. On the Wii side, Ubisoft took a big chance by making ten games for the [Wii] launch window, and it has performed very well, so far. I think that the others will catch up no later than early next year.'"
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Duh, when game companies have to innovate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The platform itself is calling for something different, and different takes time.
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Re:Duh, when game companies have to innovate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is what bothers me a little bit about most developers approach to both the Wii and DS. Since the DS, everyone has been espousing how their unique additional features will open up developer creativity, which it certainly has. However, many developers seem to take it as since the additional functionality exists, they must use it. In my opinion, this sort of thinking hampers creativity, and leads to the "mini-game-itis" that both consoles have had in their conception; it's one of the easiest things to do that uses all that functionality. Certain game types just weren't made for the Wiimote's unique functionality, and they don't have to use it. I don't really what to play a 2D fighter by waving the Wiimote all over the place, so please don't force me to.
I think Nintendo notices this, and that's why they've released peripherals like the classic controller for the Wii. I just hope that developers realize this too: innovation is great and all, but not at the detriment of gameplay.
Parent
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I'd trade innovation for polish. Innovative games are usually gimmicky, unpolished, and often tiresome. The very few that are both polished and innovative tend to shine but they are outnumbered by the number of games that are innovative and crap.
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I suppose you have never heard of this gaming system from a company called Sony. See, at first, this gaming system (known as the "PS3") was shown with this odd-looking boomerang-type controller...and for some strange reason, shortly after Nintendo revealed their "waggle stick"...this company Sony suddenly had a controller that kinda did the same thing!
So here we have Nintendo with a "waggle-stick"...Sony, the "winner" of the 6t
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That said, I have a 360 for the one game that made it worth it for me -- Forza2. I *might* buy some other racing games for it, but I haven't seen a single game that I would consider "must have" thats a PS3 exclusive.
I'm a fan of fun, and my idea of Fun doesn't involve FPSs. If that keeps me from being a "hardcore" or "real" gamer, so be it.
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As far as the PS3 goes, in my mind it will be worth getting one when God of War 3 comes out...the games I have for PS3 are OK, but I think God of War 3 is when I'm going to start loving the PS3 as a GAMING CONSOLE...cause right now, it's doing everything
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Fanboyism of all types is petty, stupid, and getting increasingly annoying to those of us who refuse to take sides.
PS3 fanboys: Yes, your console is powerful, and can do lots more than just play games. We get it, you can shut up now.
360 fanboys: Yes, your console is powerful, has more games out for it, been out longer, and so forth. We get it, you can shut up now too.
Wii fanboys: Yes, you have the wii-mote. Its different.
The biggest mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
No Star Wars light sabre-centric game out (or even officially announced, for that matter), no type of Gardening game (think about it...what would sell to grandmas around the country better than a Garden simulator using the Wiimote?)...etc, etc, etc.
Really, the possibilities are VERY large indeed when it comes to the Wii's control sceme, despite its lack of power. I know these things aren't put together overnight, but developers really need to start pushing stuff like that out soon, before the Wii commotion dies down.
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Not to mention those that have condos/apartments.
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DS and Wii are at different stages in their lives (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the DS, some of the great third party games are Trauma Center (six months after release), Phoenix Wright (~year after release though a remake with extra content), and Meteos (~year after release). I can't think of a really great third party game for the DS that was available at release, except maybe Castlevania, but definitely not one that took advantage of the DS's unique capabilities.
It took a while for the DS to catch on for developers, and it's the same sequence for the Wii. This was a mistake for many publishers, besides Ubisoft which took a "gamble" with the Wii and I guess it paid off. The development time for a console game is probably longer than that for a handheld, so we're waiting a little longer for those great third party games. I'm sure they'll come though.
Re:DS and Wii are at different stages in their liv (Score:2)
Back on topic, this is pretty much the main reason for this generation's drought of games for the Nintendo platform. Everyone thought the PS3 was going to emerge from November the champion and the Wii was gonna be left in the dust. Thus, publishers and developers positioned themselves for the PS3 and put significantly less focus on the Wii. Ubisoft, for some reason, took the contrari
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Yes. Obviously. (Score:2)
Not really (Score:2)
As for the Wii, while it's true that third parties were caught off-guard by it, I'm not sure that they should put too much effort into joining the "Wii game" to begin with. Most peopl
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you. The fact that most publishers completely ignored the GameCube while Nintendo released some very good games, means that obviously most of the games that are being bought are going to be from Nintendo. One notable exception is Resident Evil. Same thing seems to be happening on the Wii. Nintendo is releasing a lot of really good games, meanwhile, the other publishers seem to be ignoring it, or at least did at the beginning. Most people don't even bother checking who the publisher of a game is. All they want to know is whether or not the game is good, and base their decision off that.
Parent
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That's basically the exact same thing that I said. If you think that there are going to be more than a handful of third-party games that go beyond mini-game gimmickry, you're living in a dream world. Waggle really doesn't change anything.
Rob
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price. That lead to strong initial sales, which in turn led to a lot of titles being developed for this new system. More titles turned into additional hardware sales, which led to even more developer attention on that platform, and the whole thing snowballed and ultimately 120 million PS2s were sold. The Wii may have been later to market, but at the rate it's outselling PS3 and 360 it will be the most common next-gen console by a significant margin for the Christmas '08 season. That is confirmed to be attracting increased developer attention (see the comments made by the CEO of EA [crunchgear.com] for example), which means we're going to be seeing more 3rd-party titles for the Wii in the future. That in turn will likely lead to increased hardware sales, and so on.
I don't think the Wii will have anywhere near the dominance that the PS2 enjoyed, however. This generation marks the first time that I can think of where the capabilities of the various competitors were split so starkly, while at the same time being somewhat equal in terms of their desirability. The 360 and PS3 are natural extensions of the bigger better faster more mentality, but the Wii is going in a completely different direction, last-gen graphics with a new control scheme. No one's measured it yet to my knowledge, but I suspect there will be a significant amount of overlap between owners of the Wii and "true" next-gen consoles (i.e. 360/PS3). That may have an impact on how gaming dollars get spent down the road. My money's on a rough split between the Wii and the 360, though I'm not sure which will be on top. I'm convinced at this point that the PS3 will be this generation's distant third.
Parent
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
The PS2 was huge because the original PlayStation was a huge success. Sony came out of nowhere to dominate the console market by releasing the right product at the right time. The number of exclusives that Sony got helped seal the deal. It didn't hurt that Nintendo shot itself in the foot by trying to stick with cartridges instead of optical media, so people wrote off the Gamecube as a failure before it launched. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price.
Then, how do you explain the Dreamcast? It launched earlier, had good games, and at a reasonable price. Even included a modem for internet connectivity. No, what really helped the PS2 was the marketing campaign and the unquestioning support of developers. The PS2 defeated the Dreamcast before launch because it promised the moon and the stars and people decided to wait for the PS2 instead of buying the Dreamcast. (Remember the "emotion chip" that was so powerful it would show real emotion on character's face? Or, at least, on the faces of pre-rendered movies.) I'm sure it really stung for Sega, because they were derided for having made the Saturn so hard to program for. They turn around and produce a extremely nice system to work on, then get trounced by the PS2 which was a real bitch to work on. I remember one of the top programmers at the company complaining on a daily basis about how hard it was to get anything to work on the PS2. But he had to because the company was backing the PS2 110%.
Note that this "generation" of games is a bit different. The increase in graphics isn't as huge as it had been for the previous generations. The jump between PS2 and PS3 graphics is a fraction of what the jump between PlayStation and PS2 graphics were. Add in that many people don't have HD TVs yet (see the articles about most people not even knowing about the HD capabilities of the XBox 360, etc), and you have people that aren't buying a console because it looks, "ZOMG SOOOOO MUCH BETTER!"
What Nintendo did for the Wii was to go in a different direction. If Nintendo had built the Wii to appeal to the same hard-core audience that all the console makers had been chasing for the past decade, then we would have seen the Wii falter. If they had focused on graphical presentation, they would have probably been crushed (along with everyone else). No, what they did was to appeal to a new crowd that was interested in more than just the prettiest graphical presentation. So, even though the publishers wrote Nintendo off as lost, once again, people decided that the Wii was cool enough to buy without having the latest version of Madden on it. This catches all the publishers by surprise (they are the ones that decide which projects get funded), so they're now scrambling to take advantage of one of the most popular platforms for this generation.
So, this explains why things have turned out the way they did. Publishers wrote off Nintendo because they were able to do that successfully last time. Didn't work quite so well.
Some insight from someone who has seen the inside of the beast.
Parent
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Not in my observation. The Wiimote discourages traditional games, the Wii itself is so weak that its full potential will likely be realized within a couple of years, and Nintendo is still lackadaisical about online gaming. Those things are strong negatives to third parties.
Rob
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Just like more and more 3rd party game developers are making it clear they understand their own error in underestimating the Wii. Having more consoles out there than any other,
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
PSP is PS2-level hardware while DS is N64-level hardware. Speaking of N64, it was vastly more powerful than the PSX (see Waverace vs Jet Moto if you don't remember), though the PSX had the advantage of CD storage which was important for some games but not most. Mostly the ones that used lots of FMV. Gameboy vs every pre-PSP portable is a perfect example.
Pretend power is important all you want. History says otherwise. Game developers understand this.
I don't remember ever seeing a console succeed whose full potential could be realized so quickly. Less than a year into the Wii's lifespan, we already hear speculation from developers that they're approaching the limits of what the Wii can do
And I don't remember ever hearing anyone say that having it take 5+ years to figure out how to get the promised performance out of a console is a good thing. The Wii is the same architecture as the GC just with ~2-3x the frequency. It's hardly surprising that it takes developers less time to figure out how to max its potential than the PS3 given 5 years of experience with the GC, and judging from their comments they prefer it this way.
And how do you explain all the games for the PS3 and 360 which have no planned ports for the Wii, even after the third parties are supposed to have "gotten it"?
Well pretty much like you said the Wii encourages non-traditional game play. Half-assed ports with waggle controls added are what the companies are putting out now. Having "gotten it" they are not planning on continuing, instead they will be developing titles that play to the Wii's strengths. This is what you would expect.
You haven't actually said how any of these things are negatives for game developers... they just seem like things you aren't impressed with. Game developers are impressed by market share numbers. Game developers have openly supported the Wii and said they made a mistake not supporting it and are changing course in order to do so. Why you think that means the opposite of what it seems to, that 3rd parties won't be supporting the Wii, I don't know.
Parent
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Just answering your question. The fact that hardware power has not and has never been a dominant factor in console success is true in both the portable and home console market. In that way they are very similar. The history is very clear on this.
So in other words, the N64 wasn't really all that much better than the PSX? The idea that CD storage wasn't important is total bull, BTW.
In terms of "horespower", as in "ability to draw pretty pictures", then no the N64 was way more powerful than the PSX. And sorry, but most games didn't use the CD's capacity. Because most companies back then couldn't afford massive amounts of FMV. For those that did, clearly the N64 suffered. Yet for those that didn't, the PSX didn't die merely because it was "obsolete". Because nobody cared if the games were fun.
As opposed to either being stuck with an obsolete console for years or having to migrate to a new one every couple of years with all of the hassle that entails?
So "able to squeeze maximal performance from" means "obsolete" now, meaning the PS3 will never become obsolete since nobody will ever figure out how to keep all the SPEs busy, just like Sony said. Once again, this is a plus from a developers point of view. And based on the ongoing sales of the PS2, I think it's clear people care about "obsolete" a lot less than you.
And the Wii's strengths are towards gimmickry, not towards the magnificent games we've been seeing on the other systems like Bioshock and Oblivion, neither of which would really be difficult to port to the Wii if it had the required power.
I didn't know magnificent games required a certain power level unachievable before this generation. I guess Halo 1 was ass then. Of course it would have sucked less without being hindered by terrible controls. Good thing being able to aim in an FPS is just a gimmick, just like those PC users and their mouse gimmick.
Seriously, you sound like the DS detractors in its first year (which, since your first post made it seem you aren't aware, I'll let you know was light on quality 3rd party support and heavy with "gimmicky" mini-games). Competitors called the analog stick a gimmick too when Nintendo introduced it to consoles. Until they universally adopted it.
Because those go against the things that the market wants. The fact that a lot of Wiis are being bought doesn't mean anything if the games aren't being bought with them, if the Wiis are just being bought out of impulse and hype.
The market disagrees with you. The game development studios disagree with you. You want to know what happens with a console selling based solely on hype? Look at the the hysteria at the PS3 launch compared to it's performance this year. That's what hype with no substance gets you. People buy Wiis because they play them at a friend's house and find it to be fun.
Really you just don't like the Wii, and that's fine, but stop pretending that your opinion actually represents things game developers see as a downside, especially when they're saying the opposite.
Parent
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The problem is that the games that work well with those type of elements (flashy FPS games just to name one large genre) exist almost entirely due to those two elements.
But they're hardly dealbreakers. It's not like BioShock has online play.
Ubisoft says they're taking advantage of this... (Score:2)
Frankly, I think it'll take the third parties a while to get the hang of the system. There's a widespread belief that third parties can't succeed on Nintendo platforms -- which may have been partially true, but some of that is just that Nintendo polishes games to a mirror-like finish before shipping them, and most companies can't outdo them.
Still, there's plenty of awesome 3rd-pa
Everyone is late, so they are on time (Score:3, Insightful)
Same thing happened with the dot com bust. Everyone was going gung ho, expecting higher sales in 2001, when suddenly, everyone stopped buying and the bottom fell out of everyone's earnings. Customers were buying because of the Y2k scare, but when it never came, they didn't have to buy any more.
The CEOs are praised for having such good earnings before 2001, and then bemoan their luck after 2001 when they say "oh well we didn't see the crash coming." Everyone saw the damn market crash coming EXCEPT these slow CEOs. I'll admit no one knew exactly when it was coming, but it was coming soon enough.
Same with the Wii. They all were geared towards the old consoles, and now they all are getting bitten in the ass because the PS3 is overpriced and buggy, and the xbox is "eh, whatever." But the Wii is something that is getting new customers, and requires new thinking. Big slow corporations don't like to think in new ways until they are forced to.
There are of course exceptions, but the ones that do everything like everyone else don't tend to care that much or get severely penalized. They are average humans after all.
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If your company is so short sighted as to not jump on the Wii band wagon, then your company has many ways of dying. The first is that what if the Wii continues its success? Sure, it has been a long time since Nintendo was successful for a 5 year stint. However, Nintendo is likely to make its next generation console an improvement on this one. That is to say, a more a
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Starting to move anyway. The nice big TVs the advertisements call for are still well out of range. If you're content with a monitor sized TV that does HD, it's only $600 dollars (cheapest I could find on Best Buy at 1080i).
Also, your company want might to pay more attention to the "building up" of user bases. The rate at which the PS3 and Xbox 360 are selli
Re: The development migration to Wii... (Score:2)
Combine that with the costs of Development. THQ's president that said a Wii game cost between 25% - 50% of a 360 title... [gamespot.com]
So you can sell to a larger install base AND develop 2-4 games
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Wii games cost less because they don't make the game as big, as long, or as in depth as they would for another console. I'm absolutely sure that the difference in costs between HD graphic development and regular is far less than 50%. They're saving money because they're making simpler games designed for your grandmother or your 5 year old.
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What you describe is more like getting caught with your pants down, then sitting on a block of lard while carefully and diligently sewing your pants tightly around your ankles.
Frankly, though, I don't really believe you. I am more inclined to believe the developers who are doing exactly what they did with the DS: Experimenting a bit and getting serious about the system. All the "real" HD in the world won't make up for the fact that no one who's
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See, this is where typing in a British accent makes you sound to us on this side of the pond like you're from Utah.
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It's not like they're Scottish, Welsh or French, or Irish or German or Australian either...
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