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[Sho_Nuff82]

Read my post again. BF3 and Gears would've been fine alongside many other blockbuster games. Has a gears game ever been made a Nintendo platform? That is like saying that Metroid games could be hurt by kinect games next generation when they don't even share the same platform. Did CoD PS3/360 suffer because of some rinky dink Wii versions? No

My point is that those shooting games would not have been effected by more earnest efforts on the Wii. Would Dead space be any worse if extraction would've been a FPS/TPS? Would RE5 be a terrible game because of more serious RE efforts or more games like Zack & Wiki from Capcom?

hmmm

If you're simply arguing for Wii down-ports of every 3rd party game, one needs only to look at the examples of GH3, where the Wii was the best-selling version, vs. CoD: MW, where the Wii sells about 5% of the LTD sales.

It's naive to think that every game released on PS360 would scale with the Wii's userbase.

 

[Little Green Yoda]

This has always been Nintendo's problem IMHO. Their legendary conservative business sense doesn't always mesh with keeping an entertainment platform alive. When all signs point to yes, and they can be assured a platform will thrive, they'll open up the warchest and spam the platform with trillions of games - witness the DS' library. When things are uncertain, they'll help dig their own platform's grave by clamming up and putting minimal effort into it.

Nintendo doesn't exactly have that many major IPs left to expend on the Wii at this point outside of F-Zero. Their first party output on the system is equal or better than that of any other Nintendo system - the DS survived despite Nintendo shifting focus to the Wii because the third parties stepped up. This clearly didn't happen on the Wii when they shifted towards 3DS and WiiU development.

 

[Kai Dracon]

Nintendo doesn't exactly have that many major IPs left to expend on the Wii at this point outside of F-Zero. Their first party output on the system is equal or better than any other Nintendo system - the DS survived despite Nintendo shifting focus to the Wii because the third parties stepped up. This clearly didn't happen on the Wii when they shifted towards 3DS and WiiU development.

That's a point, though Pikmin 3 never showed up (after years of teasing) and they also never made the "obvious" game for the wiimote - rail shooter Starfox.

It's a bit of a paradox though. Despite some claims hyping the Gamecube up, taken as a whole Nintendo's Wii library is bigger than the GC. They did release a lot of games for it, good ones. They're just clustered in a weird and uncomfortable way. 4 AAA hardcore games one year, nothing the next year but Wii Music and Animal Crossing...? Plus, after a big start, they seemed to cease developing their big new IP this generation: the "Wii universe" titles focused around Miis.

And like I said, NOA isn't helping the perception by acting like so stupid and reluctant with their core-oriented library with all the RPGs and such.

 

[TheNatural]

Yea all resources are on 3DS and Wii-U. They don't think along the lines of "OMG we have to beat the PS2 or all the money we made disappears".

It's weird, I *just* finally got a Wii this year after being out five years, and everything about it feels like a legacy console in how recently they support it. When I got it I went through some of the channels, all the channels were 3 plus years old. Nothing new since then. The Mii Plaza thing I tried, no one was in it. The Virtual Store, all the games were released long ago, nothing new or recent since then. Even the Nintendo Video segments they post each week were full of 3DS videos and tips.

It's weird, since Mario Galaxy 2 until Skyward Sword were released, what came out of NCL Japan? Retro did DKC Returns, Team Ninja did Other M, and Good Feel did Kirby. There was virtually nothing inside the "main" level of Nintendo. Not to say the other divisions don't count as support, but just saying everything seemed to come to a halt in focusing on Wii outside of Skyward Sword and 3DS. Seems Nintendo goes in ebbs and flows trying to concentrate on handhelds and consoles, with the legacy and future versions of each.

 

[StevieP]

Ice cold but someone had to say it. I agree, I wanted the Wii to fail for the very reasons you've outlined. It's the only time I can remember I wanted one of the consoles/handhelds to really truly fail.

Well that explains the posting history.

LOL @ you thinking there wouldn't have been tons of studio closures anyway. As Wii has demonstrated time and time again, it's not a particularly good place for most developers to be anyway. But in any event, let's say that if every developer supported Wii it would have been rad and all games would have done well. Awesome!

I don't care. I'm a gamer. Closing studios is part of business. Compete or not. The great games will keep coming. Wii was holding back higher quality gaming and that's all I care about as a gamer. I'll not settle for inferior games just because some developers close because they can't make better games that the market wants.

Wii existed and it was a Nintendo platform, and it served its purpose.

Edit: Gears and BF3 would have been impacted by targeting shittier platforms quality wise; as a gamer, that is literally all I care about.

Perhaps Joker can provide the actual numbers here, but hasn't the wii sold the most third party games this generation?

 

[Plinko]

I agree wholeheartedly here. I guess in the words you put it, I I agree. I was one to say that this can't be the new standard way back before the system came out. All the hype and moms, grandmas, and hippies proved me wrong temporarily. In that sense, I wanted it to fail as well.

Shocking.

Although, I'm sure many people will claim it actually did "infect" the gaming industry by making motion controls a vital piece of the industry, leading to Move and Kinect.

 

[donny2112]

Perhaps Joker can provide the actual numbers here, but hasn't the wii sold the most third party games this generation?

It was tracking ahead of the 360 for a time in the U.S. launch-aligned, I think. It was a relative software beast, 1st and 3rd party, until around the financial crisis in October 2008.

 

[TheNatural]

Shocking.

Although, I'm sure many people will claim it actually did "infect" the gaming industry by making motion controls a vital piece of the industry, leading to Move and Kinect.

It didn't change anything with regards to companies using their big development teams to commit anything to motion controlled casual games though really. I think at most, the resources that were used for that were probably new jobs altogether, or maybe just took the place for licensed crap games in the past. Like instead of a company creating Crash Bandicoot 15 or something, maybe they opted instead to make a fitness game or something with those resources. In the end, nothing was lost, I don't see why people bitched so long that Nintendo was "ruining" gaming. All that really changed was instead of licensed shovelware, it turned into licensed shovelware with motion controls.

And that being said, getting pissed at Nintendo's direction at all was also dumb because people made that choice for them for not buying the N64 or Gamecube. I'm not saying there weren't major flaws with either system or the lineup could compete with Playstation era lineups, but the horsepower was there and the games were there to at least warrant a purchase. Those that bitched about the Wii probably didn't buy either in the first place, so had no right to complain, since they were the cause of that direction.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Gears and BF3 would have been a lot worse if they were designed for motion controls, Wii graphics, and Nintendo's archaic online infrastructure.




If a studio like Bizarre or Free Radical or Factor 5 had continued making AAA racers and FPS and flight games for the Wii, they'd still be out of business. Lack of interest is lack of interest. Are we going to pretend that PGR4 wasn't a hit because it was HD? Or because Bizarre struggled with the hardware? Or because 360 owners don't buy racing games?

The industry is still young, so people still operate under the delusion that there's room for everyone to get a slice of the pie. Look at the OT threads for the Blackberry Playbook and the HP touchpad. Look at people accepting the sobering reality that RIM probably won't be with us anymore in 3 years.

I agree that the industry has reached a saturation point for budgets, but the guys who've bowed out this round have done so because competition is higher than ever.

Bizarre is the only one that was completely out of left field for me. The other two I think would still be in business had they focused on the things they were good at. Free Radical should never have left goofy shooter area they were one of the sole developers in. Factor 5 should have never left the Nintendo fold. Their biggest screw up was thinking the fans of other manufacturers even knew who they were, let alone would support their most expensive title ever on a large enough scale to recoup dev costs.

Given we are talking hypothetically.

I think a large chunk of now defunct studios would be in a much better place had they either solely focused on the Wii, or used their last gen engines as starting points for Wii dev. Instead of their singular PS3/360 focus.

 

[Meier]

Just saying; I see people complaining about Wii line-up when it has been actually far better than GC one, and third-party wise surely better than N64.

I didn't complain about the lineup, I complained about how Nintendo handled the system. It needed a revision to re-energize the core base. The problem with comparing the Wii to the GameCube is that the GameCube's graphics were comparable or better than its competitors -- with the Wii, the difference was so staggering that the relative value of the system was crushed. If a 3rd party version of the game was even remotely comparable then it may have gotten more playtime but because it was so horribly outdated from the start, it was relegated to 2nd and 3rd tier.

I preferred the Cube to the Wii by absolute leaps and bounds. There's not even a comparison in my eyes.

 

[Barack Lesnar]

Really?

Those were the reasons I wanted it to succeed. To have a sense of stability in a really chaotic market. It's not like it would have ended the tech push, it just might have stabilized it before we lost so many studios to bankruptcy and consolidation.

But the industry on the whole completely failed. From the manufacturers of the hardware all the way down to the devs of the games. The market was completely receptive, but devs interest lay elsewhere. And that hurt a lot of them.

Next gen actually stands to be an even bigger bloodbath if budgets go higher. But some of you guys think more about "What can a studio do to make me happy?" instead of "What can they do to stay alive?"

PS4 and Loop have as large a tech increase as the PS3 and 360 did? Your favorite studio is one failure away from closing shop.

My thought process (and many others) early in the gen when you could tell Wii was about to take off was the following:

* What if devs start focusing their third-party efforts on it instead of PS3 and 360?
* What if this leads to a new era of motion-controlled gaming being the standard bearer for next-gen?

In the end, neither of these things seemed to come to fruition. The PS3 and 360 still got all the best games (meaning PC also got multi-platform ports of these games rather than Wii ports) and the motion-controlled side of things didn't completely take over. Nintendo themselves are using that tablet controller for their next console. In the end our concerns didn't matter, but at the time when nothing was certain, yes, I really wanted the Wii to fail.

 

[Vinci]

What people need to remember, and this is especially important in Wii threads like this one, is that each gamer approaches this industry with a different perspective on what they want and, thus, where the industry as a whole should be headed. Amirox and many others want games to improve technically, to reach a level of sophistication that dwarfs what came before. I get this. In fact, I can understand it, though earlier in this generation I had difficulty doing so.

But it's different from what I want.

I want video games to be like the manga market. I want anyone, regardless of age, gender, or occupation, to be able to find games that acutely appeal to their interests. I want everyone playing games. It shouldn't be a niche; it shouldn't be something measured simply through revenue. It should be measured based on the number of asses in seats.

In a larger sense, this is happening. PCs, mobile phones, and tablets have - along with the DS and Wii - expanded the audience. But I still feel that we're gravitating around certain types of experiences. And that doesn't make sense to me.

What I want to see? Shit that comes out of left field and, even if it's not meant for me specifically, is able to impress me with its core gaming concepts. I want to be surprised, fucked shocked, by the innovative use of gaming's building blocks to compose an experience in a style and setting that I could never have imagined.

This is one thing I like about Daniel Cook's exploration of the atomic level of gaming, as he seems to be one of the few really looking at how gaming affects human beings on the most basic level. But it's still early in the development of this gaming science. Here's hoping it progresses and eventually sparks a massive expansion of not only gaming's audience, but of its content.

 

[TAJ]

The main reason is that Wiis aren't breaking and needing to be replaced like PS2s.

Because they're in closets.
All three consoles fail in the same way, though. It just takes longer for some than others.