Nintendo: Third-Party Publishers Don't Get Wii

Its strange how Nintendo says that 3rd parties don't get Wii... when Nintendo themselves don't actually get anything except casuals. Perhaps if they didn't release a GameCube in a different box and different controller then 3rd parties might have tried. But then again, Nintendo isn't exactly helping the Wii's rep releasing GameCube ports and fitness games.

What I don't get is how poor the visuals are compared to say the PS2 for example I understand the Wii is not made for high end visuals but from what I am told its meant to be more powerful than a PS2?

I look at a game like God Of War 2 or Final Fantasy 10 on the PS2 then I look at well any game on the Wii and it just looks bad.

I love Res Evil 4 on the Wii but the game is diabolically scratchy and fuzzy surely they could have made it look a lot better?

I still feel the Wii is for the casual gamer or those that loved arcade games like House of the dead other than that its not a game for the hardcore or serious gamer.

Hardcore and serious gamers want games with top visuals, gameplay, online and well such consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 which offer said experiences.

not having a go here ss4, but what exactly does "serious gamer" mean anyway.

surely the word "game" denotes a sense of fun, playfulness, etc etc, so serious fun? hmm, just a bit of an oxymoron to me. i hate all these terms, people play games. yes, we dont need to classify people. i dont think, doesn't REALLY happen with other media. yes i realise there are target demographics. but i think its all a bit, well, wanky.

"im a more serious gamer than you, therefore my playing experience is more justified." or what have you, it all just seems a little bit, well juvenile.

oh wait, we are talking about people playing games.
it all makes sense now.

not having a go here ss4, but what exactly does "serious gamer" mean anyway.

surely the word "game" denotes a sense of fun, playfulness, etc etc, so serious fun? hmm, just a bit of an oxymoron to me. i hate all these terms, people play games. yes, we dont need to classify people. i dont think, doesn't REALLY happen with other media. yes i realise there are target demographics. but i think its all a bit, well, wanky.

"im a more serious gamer than you, therefore my playing experience is more justified." or what have you, it all just seems a little bit, well juvenile.

oh wait, we are talking about people playing games.
it all makes sense now.

Third parties getting the Wii: Atlus, Marvelous, Capcom if they haven't got their stupid hat on, same for EA really and finally SEGA.

And SS4 is not allowed to complain about RE4 for it's "gritty" graphics, RE4 practically started the "realism = brown and grey!!" trend everyone follows that makes console games involving anything that shoots. Only conclusion possible then, SS4 does not get "serious" games as well...the inevitable question after that conclusion: what does SS4 actually do get? Also, why do people say then that RE4 made the gamecube look like a Xbox?

I think it's more a case of the pseudo-hardcore not getting the gameing industry in general. Nintendo does not make Wiifit, Wiiplay or Wiimusic as low-quality third-rate games. They do put rather small teams on them but these teams are led by Shigeru Miyamoto, hell Nintendogs was made by one the top-teams of Nintendo (EAD2 I think) and they bloody worked two and half years on it. So the magic selling-power of these games is not some marketing ploy (that's only half the story) but that they are finely engineered pieces of software that trully hold Nintendo's age-old magic.

Offcourse games made by third string teams in a time-span of six months are going to sell like s**t. Really, people seem not to understand that Nintendo is doing exactly what was so good at in all of its existence (as a game company), making games that are completly bananas but who will eventually become the norm. The only difference now is you have some whiny niche of people who only manage to delay this process in comparison to the other norm-creating Nintendo games of the past.

im sorry but the guy who made the first comment is an idiot plain and simple. Nintendo are aiming at the casual market. They don't want games like Halo, Resident evil and gears of war. They want casual family oriantated games. Whether or not your opinion that the wii is just a gamecube is valid or not it dosen't matter to the casual market, Their not gonna want to shell out big bucks for a graphics power house. The wii may also have bad rep among the hardcore for its graphics and hardcore games but it has an amazingly good one among the casual market, the market it is actualy aiming for.

Its people like you that just can not seem to understand what the wii is for. Its not for people who lock them selfs in theor room to play the latest blood fest its for the casual crowd. The wii isnt here to impress you its here to impress casual gamers and judging by its sales its done a good job:)

I think Nintendo have mentioned they are catering for all and the hardcore Big N devotee hardcore seem to be an important part of that. Releases like Metroid, galaxy and SSBM are enough if you really play 'em to death but gamers do like to feel spoilt! i DO feel they have slightly let down their loyal followers but just slightly. The casuals are both keeping Nintendo at the top whilst blunting their claws at the same time.

While I usually come to bat for Nintendo, I honestly have to say, that even while Wii is good in concept, sales etc, that Nintendo are guilty of not thinking about Wii beyond its controls. But this is by no means the first time that they have been a let down on the technical side, a side that while it might not matter to them, matters a lot to other developers/publishers.

N64, Gamecube and even DS, have been guilty of this. While we all like a cheap console, we also expect more now from consoles (hard drives, online play etc), and Nintendo still seem to be making these same mistakes and not learning from their past.

Gamecube should have had a hard drive (especially after PS2 and Xbox had each one), but alas no, Nintendo must be different, just for what seems to be the sake of being different sometimes.

Until Nintendo realise, after all these years, that they need third parties more than vice versa and cater for them, by creating a console with a hard drive and respectable specs, things won't change and the gulf between them and third parties will remain ever wide. It will be interesting to see which way they swing, but there is absolutely no reason why Nintendo can cater for all of us, and not just so called casuals.

Maybe its just plain dumb japanese stubborness to change. Go figure.

Casuals, hardcore, these are just the labels the industry uses. While I hate them too, unless you can replace them with something better, they are all we got, chum.

Well, you would be right if not for all the companies that are having problems, the merges and everything the last years that actually prove that more then half of all the devleopers and publishers were not ready for the HD jump in terms of finances and manpower.

What use are "respectable specs" (i'm going you mean reasonable high-tech hardware) if they drive everyone to higher costs while not expanding the market and eventually grinding the industry into the dirt?

I do agree that Nintendo has that obnoxious behavior to do everything different compared to competitors just for the sake of being different. But really, the DS and Wii combined is what keeping the gaming industry from crashing so both consoles do cater to the needs of third parties: staying alive and profitable.
The DS and Wii just changed around the structures up side down and third parties are having trouble adjusting, but those structures needed change otherwise we be in a lot more s**t then now.

Optimus, chill, don't blast me, save it for Megatron. Just joking.

I agree with your latter part about DS and Wii coming along at a good time for the industry, kudos to that and I champion that. However, I still honestly feel Nintendo could have done a little better with Wii's internals. I'm sorry but 512mb is unacceptable (even with dropping prices of flash memory and hard drives). There's no denying that this is at the heart of Wii third party problems and apathy. Such a shame Nintendo are steps behind and can't see that (constantly cock blocking and offering no Wii hard drive, but strangely a Wii router seems more valid for sale, in japan??). I'm not really saying this because of graphics etc, but having a hard drive obviously gives more flexibility to devs.

I bet there are many devs who'll already be planning for the next MS/Sony consoles, because they have a reasonable idea of what they will be spec wise (still a dangerous thing after many previously banked on PS3), but 360 offers an alternative target option that will more than likely pan out. With Nintendo, devs can't do the same or rely on them anymore. I guess we could easily say that to a degree, Nintendo still have this backward looking mindset, that many other japanese devs still have, and its this that can only hold them back more, if some soul searching and adjustment isn't made.

More hyperbole (or propaganda) from SPOnG's larval pseudo-academic-in-residence/Nintendo fanboy.

Dunno about the DS, but the only part of the gaming industry that the Wii is "keeping from crashing" is Nintendo. This isn't 198X, [video]gaming isn't in danger, the sky isn't falling, and Nintendo isn't playing the part of Atlas. You might be Chicken Little, however. As far as financial difficulties...if you'd care to survey the world beyond your ivory (simulated) tower, you'd note that things are kinda tough all over.

Ah mister short-sightedness and can't read what people actually type and reflects his own problems on others instead of facing them...

1) the gaming industry didn't crash in 1983-1984, only the US market did, but because game journalism is extremely US-orientated, everyone hyperboles it to the MAJOR crash of the eighties.
2) Yes everthing is though these days, but i said in the last years so also before the s**t started to hit the fan. Before this gen started, some companies where allready running into problems like Atari, Acclaim and others and then the DS launched (in the case of Acclaim, to late).

And what is so propaganda about saying that Nintendo saved the gaming industry by launching products that make oodles of money. Owh that's right, you think i mean that Nintendo is so glorious or some s**t. You did read that i agreed with Joji that Nintendo is indeed very obnoxious with being different just for being different even if it is worse. And I Also agree with him that the Wii should have a hard-drive. And sorry Joji that I seemed to come of shooting, it wasn't intented, i had a hunce you meant that Nintendo doesn't put hard drives in their consoles (and their too slowly gradual expanding online options who are always so behind their competitors, and least MArio Strikers was fun) but you didn't it mention specifically.

If you just look at the sales numbers, Nintendo did single handly saved the Japanese gaming market, which was in decline in the starting years of this decade and trough that problably created such an financial undercurrent that prevented the same thing to happen in the US and Europe (you can see the Japanese market as a prelude to the US and Europe one, but the evidence for that isn't too strong, especially if you only look at the last years where the Japanese companies have indeed been falling back). I'm purely talking about economics, not some presupposed grandeur of Nintendo you think i'm saying. You have the brainpower to sound good, how about using some to read good.

But Joji, you are probably right that some game companies are already preparing themselves for the Sony and MS consoles, but the chance is extremely high that Sony and MS will follow the Wii-route with their next consoles. to just make consoles that are a few times more powerfull not 5-10 times as they used too. But the game companies that are preparing for it are those that have the finances and manpower to do this, but these are a minority, they're companies like Epic and Crytech, but they don't make games anymore, they make engines and then make some tech-demo around it and call it a game to sell their engines. The big majority of publishers and developers (i'm talking small to medium ones, not the big name ones with a lot of money and manpower) were not prepared for the jump to HD in terms of finances and manpower. Nintendo, with the DS and Wii, offered those companies another path of gamemaking structure, one with acces to a bigger market, lower costs, and potentially much more money.

Really, look up the list of games that Square-Enix made for the PS2 and compare that with the list of games they made for the PS3 and Xbox360 untill this date, the difference in volume is huge. Thats because HD forces developers and publishers into a high-cost structure and only a very limited part of the market really buys those games and that part isn't really growing, maybe even declining. Plus that part of the market always wants more shiny graphics and action, so you get the HD arms race. If it was only Sony and MS fighting over market share, over a couple of years, that arms race would have grinded the industry to a halt and the number of merges and acquisistions would have been even higher then we know today. The new savior of gaming would then problably be flash games on the internet jump-starting the industry.

I don't even know where to begin here.

Let's start with the Eighties...I wasn't influenced by a Americocentric games press...I lived though it, and not merely as an outside spectator. I used to attend AMOA conventions, I knew what was going on in the industry, videogames were a large portion of my family's livelihood. Yes, I am an American and so yes, most of my direct personal experience comes from the American arcade game market, but riddle me this: Has there been another point in videogaming history when the industry's future was in more doubt? Besides, it was used for illustrative purposes only, to show how ridiculous the proposition that the industry needed saving by Nintendo in the first place.

Now that we've dealt with the mote in mine, about that beam in thine own eye...in one metaphorical breath you berate me for being influenced by an America-centric gaming press, in the next you finally remember to qualify your own statement, and betray your own prejudice. By your own statement, Nintendo DID NOT, in fact, save the videogaming industry, as you have maintained to this point, but merely singlehandedly saved the Japanese gaming market.

Well, why didn't you say so?

I don't have much of a problem with that statement...it might even be true, to an extent. But this, in turn, means that to this point you have equated the Japanese gaming market with the videogame industry as a whole...so who's perception of reality is skewed now?

Obviously, to your eyes, by saving the Japanese gaming market, Nintendo has saved the videogaming industry as a whole, since those are the games and companies you have a vested emotional stake in. Other people might not see it quite the same way.

Now...on to the proposition that because the Wii and DS make shedloads of money, they must be good for the industry. Utter nonsense...the DS might be making some lucre for 3rd party devs, but the Wii is only making money for Nintendo. How does that benefit the industry as a whole? Who can say what would have happened in the absence of the Wii? Would all the money people spent on them just magically vanish? Or is it more likely that some of that money could have been spent on other videogaming commodities (360s and PS3s)? I could easily see the argument being made that the Wii is a horrible thing to happen to the gaming industry as a whole by everyone but Nintendo and a handful of devs.

I didn't want to get into this one since I'm quite enjoying the argument (in the best sense of the word) you two are having once you get off the personal attacks, but I had to comment on this assertion.

It's a widely received and repeated piece of wisdom that the move to HD has exponentially increased development costs due to asset production, models and textures and the like.

I'd like to suggest that it's only true for those wishing to create more and more realistic graphical experiences. I'm willing to bet that the asset production costs for Ratchet and Clank on the PS3 were much lower than for Drake's Fortune, for example. However, both games looked fantastic.

With a less realistic art style, games can take advantage of HD and more processing power to actually affect the game rather than have to waste resources on graphical enhancements. For example, HD gives more pixels, Xenon and Cell give more grunt, lets use that to increase the draw distance rather than the model complexity or texture resolution. With draw distance racing games become better, you can see the corner earlier, you can see the oncoming traffic earlier, etc. Same with shooters or platformers.

Smaller developers shouldn't be trying to turn out stuff on the level with Gears or Drake's they should be making more expansive games that have cartoony or cell-shaded or abstract art styles. Look at Patapon and LocoRoco on the PSP, excellent and engaging games that don't need Chains of Olympus levels of realistic graphics.

Right, let's start again with the eighties because you do not seemed to get it. I said that the industry didn't crash then on a worldwide scale, only the US-market shrank to one fourtieth of the years pervious. But because, in the years after that, the gaming press is so US-oriented, the imploding of the US market is shown as the major international crash, which it wasn't. Hell even Canada didn't felt mucht of it. I didn't deny there was a crash, it just put it in the right perspective, which is solely US-based. This has in no way implacations to your personal expercience, i don't even get why you have to mention it...

Well i did say Nintendo "saved" the gaming industry in the eighties didn't I, let's use "reformatted" because they did do that, creating the structures to which Sony and MS are holding on too to this day (now offcourse they some online distribution sprinkled over it).

And isn't that typically yank-thinking...owh it only saved some country on the other side of a ocean so it could not have affected us in no way at all, hello globalised economy says hi.
The situation was this, the Japanese domestic gamemarket was shrinking, Nintendo picked up on this and saw it as a prelude that the same thing could also happen to the US and Europe, why did they do that? Because there is some emprical evidence that you can take the Japanese gamemarket as a leading indicator (well, actually, you can use Japan as a leading indicator in anything high-tech really).
Would the same thing happen in the US and Europe? Well, we're not going to know really because the DS and to a smaller extent Wii appeared and prevented from something like that too happen in the US and Europe.
It probably could have happened but it would have had a less strong effect because of the bigger PC-gamemarkets in the both regions (that was the reason why Europe didn't had a crash in the eighties, the PC-market with the Amiga and others).

So what i'm saying is, Nintendo prevented the possible decline of the American and European game markets by acting on the declining Japanese market that has some backing to be seen as a leading indicator in the international gaming industry. Offcourse you will not read this kind of thinking on gaming websites just because of the US-orientation and everything seemed to going good at the US-front. But if you really take away all the money-streams the DS and to a lesser extent Wii are generating away out of the industry, you would see a 50-60% decline in income dissapearing with only a small percentage being redirected on the consoles of Sony and MS. The big majority of that 50-60% would not go spending on Sony and MS consoles because they don't cater to them. That's the uniqueness of the DS and Wii strategy, the Blue Ocean strategy. Nintendo now actually holds a monopoly on huge segments of the market because they brought them in in the first place.

And really, seeing the Wii as something that only saved Nintendo is dimissing all the good work some smaller publishers like Atlus, Marvelous and others have been doing on it and reaping the benefits from it at the same time. These small companies would probably have buckeld under the HD arms war, now with the Wii, they have acces to a platform that makes the best use of their limited finances and manpower.
Offcourse, you don't read much about those smaller companies because again of the US-orientated gaming press that only shows attention for the "bigger and better" games. Sure No More Heroes or Trauma Center or Carnival Games only sells half a million copies, but for Marvelous that means their best selling game from Suda51 to this date and with that, some nice profits, same for Atlus and THQ. And are they bad games? I love all three of them for the sheer fun they provide.

So you can add the dismissive nature of the gaming press for the smaller things and their very short-sighted view of the gaming industry that indirectly translates to bad perceptions that people like you spew out to the pseudo-hardcore moniker. Really i'm convinced gaming journalists actually do not know what is happening in the 50-75% of the gaming market because they are too stupid to properly cater to the new emergent markets. Case in point Imagine Publishing cancelling their Nintendo-exclusive magazine because of Nintendo's demographic shift. You can see it as prove Nintendo abondoning the "hardcore" but you can also see it as gaming journalists not able to change their mindsets and cater to the new gamers, choosing to stay on the "NINTY is tze CASUALLSS and it is the FAD!" line. I just hope gaming journalists are easier in changing their views or else they'll be pushed out of the market as well.

Jesus, I'm sorry I even brought the Eighties up, as it allowed you to go off on a (n almost completely unrelated to the topic of the moment) tangent.

We can debate the Eighties later, trust me, we'll have lots to disagree about there, (you Nintendo-centric revisionist, you) but lets not forget what started all this:



You weren't talking about the Eighties there, and now that you've betrayed your youth, prejudices, and ignorance (we can get back to that when we discuss the Eighties) I think we can revise it to:



But let us keep it short and simple, and get back to what this was all about, how are you going to defend THAT statement? How is the Wii "keeping the game industry from crashing" when the only people who are making money from it are Nintendo and a handful of Japanese devs?