Game Dev Tycoon studio outlines future plans
Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced already has 350,000 words of new content
Contrast casts shadows on vaudevillian Paris
EA puts Fight Night on hold in favor of UFC
Sanctum 2 review: friendly fire
Developers Address Wii Development Hurdles
by Jeff Mattas, Dec 11, 2009 7:00pm PSTIndustry magazine Develop recently surveyed a number of game developers for their thoughts about making games for the Nintendo Wii. Developers were asked if they have been able to take advantage of the Wii's potential given its global leadership in the home console environment. Their responses, while not entirely surprising, clearly illustrate some common concerns.
One of the chief issues cited by those surveyed was that when a 3rd-party introduces a new IP on the Wii, they do so from a commercially tenuous proposition. According to an anonymous studio head of a "leading international developer," the ease of Wii development compared to other consoles is partly at fault in that "it has become too easy to flood the market with under-developed product(s) which have the potential to confuse and disappoint the public." Ed Daly, General Manager of Zoe Mode, further supported the view that oversaturation makes bigger developers wary stating that, "fear that over-supply and fatigue from the mainstream Wii adopters is holding back some publishers and suppressing dev budgets."
Gary Penn, Creative Director of Denki Ltd., reveals his "love-hate relationship with Nintendo. He states that he "hates most of what's done with the Wii," explaining that he rarely bothers with titles on the console that aren't first-party offerings. That said, he also admits that he has "infinitely more fun" playing the Wii with his kids than any other console.
Zoonami CEO Martin Hollis cites "humility" as one of the key requirements for Wii development, stating that, "...you will be making games for people who are unlike yourself. Therefore you will need to place their wishes above yours."
Climax Studios CEO Simon Gardner also weighs in regarding his studio's recent "hardcore" Wii title, Silent Hill Shattered Memories. He believes the actual game development process for Wii is "fine," but admits that it's still unclear whether or not hardcore games can be successful on the Wii. "I think it's yet to be proven," he stated. "I think a lot of people have bought Wii's, but many aren't buying software for it."
That matches up with our earlier report on the Metacritic data for the year. 362 games came out this year for the Wii but only about a fourth of those games were assessed as positively-reviewed by Metacritic. Yet despite developer concerns, Wii's continue to sell like proverbial hotcakes.
Comments
The reason is because almost no one is even trying to make a decent game for "hardcore" gamers.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 11 replies.
Longer Schedule = More Money
Publishers arent willing to pay for longer schedules, so you get under designed games. (Except from expensive first party development efforts, which tend to be much longer and costly.)
The mystery is explained!
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 2 replies.
Name one AAA third party game on the Wii. There aren't any. If they made games of that quality, people would buy them. The few ports they have made of even modest quality have sold well, from Call of Duty to RE4 to Guitar Hero.
Why does PSP get it's own original Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy (not crystal chronicles) and Resident Evil games, while the much more powerful Wii gets a couple rail shooters? Make real, good games, and amazingly, people will buy them.
And before anyone brings up the old niche favorites or slop like Madworld, Zak&Wiki and Conduit - if those had been 360 exclusives, would millions have bothered to buy them? No. They are objectively not that good or niche as hell. Again, there have been no top-shelf, AAA third party games on Wii.
Cry me a river, devs.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 10 replies.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 4 replies.
But I digress. If Capcom were to develop a direct sequel to RE4 for the Wii that maintains the quality and tone of RE4--meaning, something that is the antithesis of RE5--the game would easily become one of the most successful titles--regardless of platform--of this generation of games. Capcom could print money. Well, more so than they already can.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 2 replies.
Here's what I mean - what are all the games made for the Wii? Can you list them all? Well actually, you can, and people do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games
Same goes for the other consoles.
What are all the games for the PC? Can you list them all? Probably not. I mean you'd have to count every indie game, every casual game, every educational game, everything. And it goes back many many years since you can define anything that's compatible with DOS onwards as a "PC Game"
So you look at the percentage of games on the Wii that are shovelware or crap (and for fun let's say there's an actual line everyone can agree on) and compare it to the 360 or PS3 and the Wii probably has a higher percentage (shovelware at least).
But you can't really do that for the PC because you can't really pin down a number of PC games released throughout history.
So the PC and the Wii both have the same trait - easy to develop for - but it winds up being a liability for the Wii (in 3rd party developers' eyes) because you can whittle down the library on a console to a finite number of titles and you can judge the landscape by it. But developers don't look at the number of casual games on the PC and decide that they can't make money on the Peggle machine.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 2 replies.
You must be logged in to post.