Isn't that most of the Wii's fanbase? And that isn't sarcasm either.
Think about it: Person A buys CoD4, loves it and recommends it to all his friends. Person B buys The Conduit and is underwhelmed by it, if he even talks about it it's probably about the disappointment. If you want a fair comparison try finding similarily crappy or niche games on the PS360. E.g. how much did Infernal: Hell's Vengeance or Legendary sell?
What games sell by word of mouth? Nintendo's, because they're the best on the system. "Hey, have you played Wii Fit?" Yet somehow I doubt these words have ever been uttered by anyone, anywhere outside these forums: "Hey, have you played Zack & Wiki?"
And? They didn't care about the graphics hardware last gen and everybody said they'd always be loyal to the market leader. Now it's suddenly a "rule" that graphics matter more than marketshare.
Last generation they didn't have to make any sort of graphical choice. The PS2, Xbox, and GameCube were all in the same graphical ballpark. If you chose to make a PS2 game it wouldn't have all the visual bells and whistles that it would on Xbox and GameCube, but it would look comparable. The best-looking game on Wii is Super Mario Galaxy, and if you take a game in a similar genre on, say, PS3 - Ratchet & Clank, for instance - the difference is noticeable and obvious.
That's a ton of assumptions. What I mean with "demand" is that they'll say "I won't buy this because it lacks X". Of course graphics are nice to have, I'm not going to refuse to buy a game because it's pretty but would RE5 on the Wii make many people think "it's not pretty enough, I will not buy it"? Non-gamers are impressed by awesome graphics just as much as anybody else but they weren't gamers before because it wasn't the ugly graphics that turned them away, it was the game underneath.
I think you would definitely have a lot of people not buying it because it's "identical to RE4". From a visual, perspective that is. RE5 is the same as RE4 gameplay wise, so what other hook is gonna be there? IR control?
On average HD games cost 2.5 times as much to develop so the same return on investment would require selling 2.5 times as many copies as it would on the Wii. You say RE5 would sell less on the Wii but would it sell 60% less? Also how many people would decide to buy it because it has better controls on the Wii? If the number of sales lost to weaker graphics minus the number of sales gained through better controls is less than 60% of the sales of RE5 on the HD systems then making it a Wii exclusive would have made it more profitable.
I dunno, across PS3/360 RE5 pushed 4.4 million last I read, while RE4: Wii Edition pushed 1.5 million (Capcom figures from May 2009). That's what, 65% higher sales? I realize that RE4 is an old game, but you gotta think that a majority of people on Wii that likes that type of title picked it up. RE5 is one game, but I think in this case Capcom made the right move. I also think that RE5 got more buzz because of its graphics prowess, due to the fact that game media are graphics whores for the most part.
Noone ever gave a **** about what the grunts want, they do what they're told to do or they're unemployed. It's the managers who decided to make HD games, if the grunts happen to agree that's just a coincidence.
Wow, I hope you never manage any human beings, ever. Yes, decisions are made by the suits, but if they team doesn't want to make Wii games they'll go elsewhere. Besides, if you're paying a badass graphics programmer a ton of money, are you going to waste their talents making an engine for Wii? Hell no. You're going to put them where their talents are best put to use. You'll put the second-tier guys on the Wii title, or the junior guys there so they can figure out what they're doing. You want your best people doing the most difficult stuff. This assumes that the project they're working on will make money, of course, but that's a separate issue.
I think development costs are a key part of the puzzle, but if your game won't sell, your investment only determines how much money you lose. You can spend $1000 making something that sells for $100, and if you only sell 2 of them you've lost $800. On the other hand, you can spend $3000 making something that sells for $100, sell 50 of them and make $2000. Like I've always said, companies like GRIN going under isn't because they developed an HD game in particular; its because they developed a game that didn't sell. The high development cost only ensured that they got castrated, instead of punched in the face.
They'd also incur an additional 150% cost increase on every game they develop and need a higher price on the hardware and a loss of GC backwards compatibility. Even if they had boosted the graphics a bit, they would still have been far behind the 360 (because the 360 was built to be sold at a loss even at its 400€ launch price, no way Nintendo could get close to that with the increased controller expenses and whatnot) and developers would still call it impossible to port and still throw PSP ports on it (the PSP is MUCH weaker than the Wii yet it is considered acceptable to port that way!). Additionally Nintendo would not have gained additional sales to make up for the reduced profit per sale (in part because the Wii sold at an unprecedented rate until Nintendo ****ed up with the whole user generated content mess and whatnot that led to a massive software drought). The Wii's sales limiter is still not the hardware but the software.
Nintendo was backed into a corner after the GameCube, that's for sure. Their appeal amongst the gaming core was gone, so they had to go for a different audience entirely. I'll concede you this point, since they had nothing to lose really. Nobody really cared about Nintendo no matter what their games looked like, so more of the same was not the answer.
Almost every franchise out there had multiple iterations last gen so that's clearly not stopping them. Think about it, 3 GTAs, 3 Prince of Persias, 2 God of Wars, 2 Halos, 2 Devil May Crys and many more that I can't even remember. Sequels differ from the previous game in way more than just the graphics.
Yeah, but years after the fact? All of those games were released within the same hardware generation and time window. I refuse to believe that there's a pent-up demand for a Prince of Persia game on Wii that looks like a Prince of Persia game on Xbox. In 2009 it would be completely written off and marginalized.
Didn't stop the DDR pads and all the other fitness peripherals. Also the "conflict of interest" and absorbing the risk is a non-sequitur, what exactly makes Nintendo more capable of absorbing that risk that's part of the Wii's design (instead of their company structure/strategy which any smart company could replicate)?
They can take that risk because they get money from both the hardware and the software. They have money rolling in hand over fist from both ends of the platform, so they can survive if a risky game underperforms. See Wii Music (not that it was an utter failure, but rather not a spectacular success). Third-parties don't have that same luxury.
How does that compare to other systems? What about, say, Mirror's Edge?
Do you mean the underperformance of Mirror's Edge? Not every Hardmaturecore game on PS3/360 is going to sell...such as Mirror's Edge, Bionic Commando, etc. But I honestly think it's less risky, although hindsight is also 20/20.
Topic: TALKBACK: NWR Round-Table 3: 500 Copies Sold (Read 40941 times)
