MadOdorMachine said:
Edit - Sorry, I guess my point is that Nintendo has tried courting third parties, but below are the results of why I think the situation is what it is.
I've already said it, but I'll go into to detail of what I think the problem is. First off, both Nintendo and the third parties are to blame. You can't say Nintendo isn't trying, but they aren't trying hard enough, so let's start at the beginning.
N64 - Nintendo lost a lot of Japanese support to Sony by sticking with cartridges rather than using disc based media. They did reach out, particularly to western developers. Remember the dream team - Midway, Acclaim & Lucas Arts had a huge following on N64. Nintendo even made an arcade cabinet in collaboration with Midway. Either way, it wasn't enough and Nintendo knew they had to fix the problem. A pattern began to develop with gamers though: Nintendo's first party games were labeled as "Kiddy." Probably viral marketing by Sony.
GCN - Nintendo made a system that was easy and cheap to program for. They made deals with Capcom, Konami, Sega and Namco. They also started looking to smaller companies from both the east and west to make games with. Aside from a few examples, third party ports were kiddy. Exclusive games like Turok, Shadowman, Doom, Quake etc. were no where to be found and went to Xbox instead. Western devs had jumped ship - something Nintendo probably weren't counting on. It didn't help matters any that GCN released with Luigi and not a single mature title, but hind sight is 20/20. By the time GCN had reached it's 3rd birthday, third party ports were notorious for being unacceptably sloppy. Either way, Nintendo should have reached out to western devs like they did w/N64.
Wii - Nintendo launched with Zelda and RE4 which both sold well and released with in the first few months of Wii. Despite that, western third parties continued to push kiddy shovelware down Wii gamer's throats. Any mature third party game worth looking at is either a sloppy port, downgraded or a niche genre. Nintendo appears to be mainly focused on eastern third parties, while western third parties have all but given up like they did w/GCN. Edit - Actually western devs had written Wii off from the get go. Gamers have learned that aside from those niche titles, third party games will have to be sought elsewhere. Nintendo knew this and specifically chose to leave that fight between Sony and Microsoft. They do still need third party exclusives though.
It's really not that complicated, but both parties are responsible. I do think a lot of it has to do with Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln retiring from NOA. Every since that point, NOA has been in a serious decline. Reggie seems to be solely focused on the casual gamer and not the core gamer. Someone needs to talk to him though and resolve the situation. Miyamoto won't be around forever and when that day comes, Nintendo will need all the third party support they can get.
I agree with most everything you say here, yeah. I'd only add a few things...
One would be that it wasn't just that the Xbox took over the Western hardcore gamer audience that the N64 had had. I mean, that definitely happened, absolutely no question, and you're absolutely right that it was a key point in why the GC did not get anywhere near the N64's level of success in the US. But even beyond that I'd say that Nintendo was hurt by how some of its major N64 Western third parties collapsed during the 6th gen, so even though some of the major ones like Midway and Acclaim did support the GC with some titles, their games just weren't as popular or successful as they had been the previous generation. Acclaim went out of business in the middle of that generation, and Midway only avoided it because of Sumner Redstone... and as soon as he sold (early this gen) they collapsed and got sold and broken up. And the companies that could have potentially replaced them were all on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo lost Rare to Microsoft and dropped Left Field after just one GC title each, and then there was the whole Silicon Knights thing... anyway, my point is, on the GC Nintendo was still making some efforts to attract the US hardcore, with stuff like Silicon Knights and Retro. It's the Wii where they pretty much abandoned that, really. But yes, overall the GC era was definitely a big change from the N64, there were just so many fewer major Western third-party exclusive titles, and instead the major third-party exclusive titles were Japanese. The difference was very noticeable.
But anyway, yeah...
-Xbox takes the Western FPS gamers who had been N64 fans the previous generation
-More Japanese exclusive titles which are not as successful here as the Western ones on the N64 had been
-Midway and Acclaim fall apart
-Rare leaves, Left Field dropped
-Silicon Knights joining and then leaving during the generation
-Retro founded; it and NST are Nintendo's only remaining Western development teams.
And the result was that the GC sold a lot less than the N64 had in the US -- 12.93 million GCs versus a bit over 20 million N64s -- which was a much bigger drop than the SNES to GC drop was in the US (the SNES sold 23.35 million in the Americas). The N64 had sold about 60% of its worldwide total in North America. The Gamecube only slightly evened it out on that, to maybe 56%, but in Japan at least that wasn't for lack of trying. It just didn't pay off until the DS came out.
But anyway, the difference between Wii and GC, as you say, is that with the GC they were still making some efforts to recapture that base. With the Wii they abandon it completely in favor of a focus on casuals and their base instead. Meanwhile Western third parties, bitter at the weak graphics I guess, decide to not support the system with much worth mentioning. At least the GC got some of the multiplatform titles...
Of course, this does apply much more to NOA than NCL. As has been said, NCL's current strategy is quite a bit better and more comprehensive. NOA's not paying attention because of all thatm oney they're making, but yeah, eventually their near-total disrespect of hardcore gamers, with all those games they have passed on localizing, no serious efforts to get much hardcore stuff on the Wii (sure, developers don't want to develop for a weaker system, but if Nintendo was paying...), etc, might come back to bite them... maybe not, maybe the casual-and-Nintendo-fans-who-won't-give-up-on-us strategy will keep working, but wouldn't it be better to be doing like NCL is and not putting all your bets on that?
But anyway, yes, I agree, both Nintendo and third parties are to blame. Nintendo didn't put much effort into getting Western hardcore stuff on the Wii (or Japanese core stuff that Western gamers would really like like Resident Evil games), and Western developers didn't want to support it because of the graphics and just dumped minigame collections on it. But Western or Japanese, when third parties start saying things like how bad sales of a rail shooter show that hardcore games won't sell on the Wii, when to some extent it's their own decisions that got the system to this point, it's pretty stupid.
Maybe Nintendo really doesn't need a better relationship with third parties, but yeah, I can't help but wonder. Of course it's really hard to compete with Nintendo, but still, with such a large market it's ridiculous that third parties continue to mostly ignore the system, as far as actually releasing good games on it goes. I know some of those casual games are decent games, but those lower review scores even for major titles definitely say something. But yeah, it's definitely factors from all sides -- Nintendo itself, Sony and Microsoft, and third parties -- that got things to this point. You can't just blame one group for the whole issue.