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Game developer poll finds interest in iPhone increasing, Wii decreasing
- Thread starter Tiktaalik
- Start date
The Faceless Master
Member
releasing games that say "Made by Nintendo" is very restricting to 3rd parties.Boonoo said:
GrotesqueBeauty
Banned
It's been fascinating and frustrating watching developers (or at least publishers) piss away opportunity this generation amidst a flurry of bad assumptions, specious rationalizations, and circular logic. Equally as nonsensical is the choir that surrounds the subject on message boards singing a chorus that goes "industry knows best" simply because, well, it's the industry.
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Publishers are stupid.Beardz said:
You want a market on a console? You build the loyalty of that market and they will come. They didn't try. They deserve no cookies.
boiled goose
good with gravy
I thought devs didnt like Wii because it was underpowered...
To be fair, the last time we saw a poll involving the gaming industry we got this beauty.Beardz said:
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
Beardz said:
It's the standard moaning refrain of this generation to call anyone who dares to suggest that the rest of the industry just may have misjudged Nintendo a "fanboy". It doesn't matter how much evidence there is that publishers are dumb, that developers actively don't want to make good Wii games because they're arrogant, biased, elitist, or actually lazy, or anything like that.
Right now, pubs and devs will look for any excuse to paint the Wii as a sinking ship (AS IT SELLS OUT AGAIN LAWL) and redouble the propaganda about Casual Gamerz because it supports the narrative they wish to push.
GrotesqueBeauty
Banned
I suppose developers and publishers are qualified geniuses because they can't figure out how to satisfy consumers and turn a profit on the fastest selling console of all time. And naturally anyone who thinks they've squandered an enormous opportunity must be a Nintendo fanboy. Great analysis. Your cutting insight will not soon be forgotten.Beardz said:
It's more like they latch onto whatever excuse is most convenient at the time.amtentori said:
balladofwindfishes
Member
If you look at the Wii, good casual games, good niche games, and good "semi-hardcore" games sell very well.Dragmire said:
We're basically looking at publishers who think if Anubis 2 doesn't sell what Galaxy sells, it means the Wii is dead. EA has had several very profitable casual games on the Wii. And they're profitable because... they're actually good games. Now there's a novel concept; that good games actually sell more copies than terrible games.
You see, casual gamers are not as dumb as most "gamers" make them out to be. Actually, I'd be willing to argue they're better at buying games than gamers are. A "gamer" may overlook blatent flaws in the game, jump through DRM hurdles and pay money for DLC that should have been in the game to start. They'll buy yearly sequels, and overlook when a game has very little difference between another game. I guess to use anecdotal evidence, my dad has Madden 08 on the Wii. He bought it, because it was 15$ used, in early 2009. He had his choice of Madden 09, or Madden 10, but he went with the cheaper one because he really didn't see any difference on the back of the box, and the cashier at Gamestop didn't know of any real changes other than "new art direction" and "new roster," neither of which my dad cares about. He just wants a football simulator, and knows Madden is a good brand for that.
So developers don't like casual gamers, because they're harder to market to. Casual gamers don't read IGN reviews, nor do they post on message boards. Casual gamers rely on TV ads and mostly word of mouth. They don't buy into DLC or cash-in sequels, and certainly won't pay for Live. And here's an even more novel concept; they don't care what the game looks like, as long as it's fun for them. My dad didn't even know the Wii couldn't do HD until I told him and he kind of just went "oh... well that's a shame" and continued playing Tiger Woods 10 for the 200+ hours he single handidly has on that game. The trouble is, he's not going to buy 11, and that's what game developers don't like about a casual gamer like him. Actually, he only got 10 because I pushed Motion+ like the next coming of christ. He would have gotten 9, or even 8 if 10 didn't use M+. If the back of the box doesn't make it blatenly clear there's any difference between the sequels, he just won't buy into it.
The Maxx said:
Everything.
@topic:
3rd-Parties take a big shit on the Wii, it didnt succeed. Now they´re leaving. Thanks, at least now you´re giving Ninthings fuel for really only buying Nintendo-games.
God, I really hope the Wii Too becomes even more successful than the Wii and 90% of third parties die down. So much apathy, arrogance and pure dumbness.
I actually dont feel like touching this topic for the xth time, but: Pro-tip: Put great games on the Wii, and sales will be great as well (with exceptions, of course). But nah, make shitty Iphone-games....lol
This seems to reflect my current taste. I've recently really gotten into iPhone games, and haven't touched my Wii in a while. Then again I'm pretty fucked up in my gaming habits, and tend to game 90% on one system for a while, and then suddenly switch over to a different one and not play the last one at all. I'll probably be playing my Wii most of the time in a few weeks.
yurinka
Member
Free games and demos aren't lucrative, and are included here.SecretBonusPoint said:
good luck with that lucrative iPhone market! Make sure you stand out.
Also looks like non-game "entertainment" titles are also included looking at the title.
iPhone games are more similar to PC Flash games than to PSP, Wii & DS games.
Gosh. I love my Wii, but buying games sometimes it is hard. Walk down the Wii section in Gamestop, and right now there are two or three third party games that I will eventually buy once I clear my backlog (Silent Hill, No More Heroes and Tatsunoko vs Capcom). Just three. Everything else that is worth a damm in the platform are first party games.
How the hell do western developers pretend to sell anything if they are unable to put out a single decent game for the holiday season? My Wii shelf right now is a ton of first party gems, three or four good third party games (and that's giving No More Heroes and Boom Blox a pass) and a small crowd of mediocre games that I got just because they were cheap and a step above shovelware.
On the PS3 side, meanwhile, I think I only have three first party games (Singstar, Motorstorm and Uncharted); the rest are third party games, usually bought second hand. There is not much point of buying new; the platform is so over saturated that AAA titles suffer price collapses in mere months - weeks, if the game bombs.
Third party developers should understand that every single $50 I put down in a Nintendo game is $50 I am not spending in their software. Nintendo games do not drop in price because they have long, long legs - in no small part because no one else is putting anything else out in the system. They can not choose not to compete with Nintendo - they are already doing it, and losing badly.
Think this Christmas: How many people got NSMBW? How many people passed on Buzz, Singstar, Band Hero or Assasin's Creed for it? I know I did. I wait for price drops.
The stupidity on this industry is just baffling.
How the hell do western developers pretend to sell anything if they are unable to put out a single decent game for the holiday season? My Wii shelf right now is a ton of first party gems, three or four good third party games (and that's giving No More Heroes and Boom Blox a pass) and a small crowd of mediocre games that I got just because they were cheap and a step above shovelware.
On the PS3 side, meanwhile, I think I only have three first party games (Singstar, Motorstorm and Uncharted); the rest are third party games, usually bought second hand. There is not much point of buying new; the platform is so over saturated that AAA titles suffer price collapses in mere months - weeks, if the game bombs.
Third party developers should understand that every single $50 I put down in a Nintendo game is $50 I am not spending in their software. Nintendo games do not drop in price because they have long, long legs - in no small part because no one else is putting anything else out in the system. They can not choose not to compete with Nintendo - they are already doing it, and losing badly.
Think this Christmas: How many people got NSMBW? How many people passed on Buzz, Singstar, Band Hero or Assasin's Creed for it? I know I did. I wait for price drops.
The stupidity on this industry is just baffling.
yurinka
Member
Lynx had pad and buttons. Unlike in iPhone, you were able to play decently almost every traditional genre in Lynx.Tobor said:
iPhone isn't a traditional console / gaming platform. And it's a saturated market with tons of shovelware, free games, demos and $0.99 games. I don't know why it should be interesting to console games devs.
GrotesqueBeauty said:
Yes, there are a number of smart posters here who keep repeating that publishers want to make a profit and imply the majority know exactly how to do that. Many companies do not seem to be doing very well yet onlookers follow right along with companies that radically shift their focus repeatedly like EA.
At every new twist the argument is publishers didn't know what they were doing a minute ago but they know exactly how to proceed from now onward.
Beardz said:
I don't know much about the market, but my corporation isn't losing money. Also, this is an example of the whatever publishers are doing right now is right argument.
charlequin
Banned
Tiktaalik said:
Western developers have been busy diverging into two opposite directions for going on ten years now: Hollywood-blockbuster-style audiovisual spectacles with lavish production values and huge budgets, and tiny no-budget games for housewives and people with ten minutes to kill.
That's why the Wii, PSP, and DS are getting left in the empty middle. If you want to hitch your cart to an unsustainable business model in pursuit of becoming the James Cameron of Games, you might as well go (almost) all the way and develop for PS360; if you want to make incremental money off of a minor initial investment the markets built around < $10 games (iPhone, Facebook, browser games, etc.) are the obvious way to go.
Kilrogg said:
Because you have to take an outside-the-box approach to succeed on it.
If you look at 5th Cell, which I think everyone agrees is the only Western developer to succeed even twice on DS, their games are all built to be sold in a very specific way: here's the (easily describable in a sentence) high concept, here's the unique way they work with the DS' features, here's why you want to get hyped about them. They are custom-built to answer the question "well, I just got a DS... now what?"
Publishers, by and large, hate answering that question because it's difficult to automate or duplicate. They prefer to answer a different question: "out of all the disposable and fungible products that came out this week, which one is the best at doing the same thing as all the others?" Both the PS360 and iPhone platforms are better suited to selling products on this basis -- the former with its core purchasers and their seemingly insatiable desire for even mediocre entries in certain genres, the latter with its vast array of casual purchasers who are more likely to try whatever's on this week's top 10 list than actually hunt down something that very precisely meets some specific need.
Mario said:
Yeah, I think a lot of developers are going to get bitten in the ass on this, and eventually you'll see these giant lists of enthusiastic developers filtered down to a much smaller list of companies that have actually found a way to stand out from the crowd on the platform. The App Store is a classic gold-rush scenario and there's no reason to believe this one is going to be any more sustainable than those that have come before.
mugurumakensei said:
While you are correct that this is irrational, there is at least an underlying reason behind it: Nintendo make games targeted at a different audience than the vast majority of Western publishers, and the skillset to identify what is appealing to that audience is almost entirely lacking at said publishers as a result.
You've seen a lot of publishers "try" to serve the "Wii market" by releasing obviously garbage shovelware crap that then did not sell because no sane living person could possibly want it. Because they lack the understanding to discern what separates these products from Nintendo's popular successes like Wii Sports, the reaction is to assume that they've been "beaten" by "competition" from Nintendo (despite no logical basis for such a determination) rather than stop and realize that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Nintendo's successful products.
Both the boon and bane of the iPhone platform is that you have titles from practically anyone. You get a lot of gems, and some genuinely unique titles, but you also get complete rip-off and poorly executed titles just because they think they can make a game. An a LOT of them.
I enjoy the platform overall, though. It reminds me of a time when I first got into gaming, back when my first and only system was the original Gameboy. It was all about spending some time on a game. There wasn't anything fancy and people just tried to make fun games. If you spend a bit of time with the platform you do find the gems, and they're often worth it.
I enjoy the platform overall, though. It reminds me of a time when I first got into gaming, back when my first and only system was the original Gameboy. It was all about spending some time on a game. There wasn't anything fancy and people just tried to make fun games. If you spend a bit of time with the platform you do find the gems, and they're often worth it.
charlequin said:
Do you really have to though? While I agree that the most successful companies on the system were those who think outside-of-the-box, we've had significant evidence from Japanese developers that traditional games can prove at least mildly successful, haven't we? Or do you think that Western games don't/wouldn't work because they tend to be on the spectacle side, and thus would perform poorly on an underpowered system such as the DS? How much do games like Call of Duty sell on the system?
Abandoning one shit platform for another. I cannot say I am happy or sad about the potential migration.
But really this only applies to very small developers. It is not like EA is going to abandon the Wii and go straight mobile/ IPhone. The Wii may lose some of those Ubisoft shovelware exclusives though.
But really this only applies to very small developers. It is not like EA is going to abandon the Wii and go straight mobile/ IPhone. The Wii may lose some of those Ubisoft shovelware exclusives though.
Night_Trekker
Member
jajas2 said:
If this is a problem for the Wii, it's going to be a massive problem on the iPhone in short order.
That's probably because this would be the perfect time to gain a stronghold on genre's on the iPhone. Put out brand-awareness with Fifa, Madden, Need for Speed etc and create a fanbase for future titles instead of waiting for others to come and claim and grow the marketplace.zoukka said:
A diverse ecosystem doesn't need to "know" anything to be right. Those that do the successful things will flourish and expand. The others will go away or try to change. Even if all actors start at complete random, the right choices will carry those who made them to the top in a short amount of time.GrotesqueBeauty said:
Diablohead
Member
I use to hate most Gameloft games on the iPhone because they were clones or obvious copies of other games to make a quick buck but over time they have become one of my favourite because not many developers right now make full blown games worth more then a few coins, Gameloft however have made about 6 games I have high interest in and they are all longer then a "get as high as you can" mini game, which are 100 too many on the app store.
They also did a good job on porting Driver 1 to the iPhone, the classic with touched up visuals and the choice to play with the original difficulty or a remastered balanced normal mode, how many devs out there for the iPhone right now take that much care in making their game? Not many.
Every day I check out a page full of new releases on the app store and only about 1 game a day is worth a damn, the rest are throw away clones or attempts to make a quick buck, and that is where most of that bar graph value comes from.
They also did a good job on porting Driver 1 to the iPhone, the classic with touched up visuals and the choice to play with the original difficulty or a remastered balanced normal mode, how many devs out there for the iPhone right now take that much care in making their game? Not many.
Every day I check out a page full of new releases on the app store and only about 1 game a day is worth a damn, the rest are throw away clones or attempts to make a quick buck, and that is where most of that bar graph value comes from.
One of the WiiWare games for the week of August 8, 2009 was Sexy Poker, a strip-poker card game. Granted, it seems there is no actual nudity, but the entire point of the game is so crude in the first place I can't see how you could claim Nintendo is filtering any kind of content that could make up an actual game.zoukka said:
AceBandage
Banned
In order for third party support to decrease on the Wii, that would imply that it had any substantial support in the first place.
Third parties: "Well, we shit all over the Wii and can no longer sell games, so I guess it's time to shit all over the iPhone."
Third parties: "Well, we shit all over the Wii and can no longer sell games, so I guess it's time to shit all over the iPhone."
charlequin
Banned
Kilrogg said:
The difference here is what the box is. Japanese developers never peeled away from platformers, turn-based RPGs, adventure games, etc. with the fervor that Western developers did, and these are some of the most successful genres on the DS. All this stuff is mostly outside the core competencies of Western studios these days.
I mean, I agree, something like Phoenix Wright or Final Fantasy III really isn't "outside the box" in a broad sense (especially given that both were ports or remakes of games from older systems) but you'd be hard-pressed to find more Western-developed titles than you could count on one hand that take after either.