While this holiday season and past month saw a solid resurgence in high quality games landing on the Wii (with the likes of New Super Mario Bros. and No More Heroes 2 be released), it appears that developers are shying back away from the system. According to a recent survey conducted by Game Developer Research, the number of developers working on the Wii has gone down since last year.
With 41 percent of the respondents saying that they made games for consoles, only 30 percent of them said that they are working on the Wii. This is down from the 42 percent that said that they were developing for the system last year. Meanwhile, 69 percent of the console developers are making games for the Xbox 360, and 61 percent for the PlayStation 3. Those numbers are pretty much equal with last year's.
This may sound like bad news for the Wii, but looking at the year's upcoming line-up, it seems to me like we're most likely just losing a whole bunch of the mini-game crap that has finally slowed down sales wise. If that 12 percent loss was 10 percent shovelware and 2 percent real games, I'm fine with that.
Wii development in decline - Survey [GameSpot]
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Contest:
11:00 PM on 02.06.2010
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The way I see it, all the shovelware complaints gamers make are not inherently about the quantity of shovelware, but rather the lack of games that are not considered shovelware. It doesn't matter how many "Imagine: Party Babyz" are released so long as there are a few Modern Warfares to enjoy. After all, no one cares that "Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust" exists because it's easy to ignore on the 360.
The real problem is that there are no good 3rd party games. And by good, I do not mean Muramasa or No More Heroes (in spite of the latter being one of my favorite games ever). I mean that the Wii does not have any 3rd party games to compete with Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty in terms of popularity and universal appeal. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom doesn't qualify because frankly, Tatsunoko isn't mainstream in the west. A Marvel vs. Capcom would be good because lots of Americans love Marvel but having Tatsunoko and not using their only IP I can recognize Evangelion? That fighting game is not a 3rd party giving their all to wii developement.
There is exactly one title in the entire wii library that counts as a high-grade 3rd party game, and it's Monster Hunter Tri. And Nintendo has promoted that game beyond the realm of reasonable. Monster Hunter Tri is getting more support from Nintendo than Mario, and when a company gives it's partners' IP better advertising and bundles than it's own, you know that there is something wrong.
Even if it means losing a hundred shovelware titles and exactly one good game, the decrease in developers is really bad. Because so far there is only one good 3rd party game, and it hasn't even come out in America yet.
basically nintendo is hosting a party for itself and nobody is invited.
Evangelion is Gainax. That's why you don't see Evangelion in TvC - because Tatsunoko doesn't own it. They just helped with the animation.
That'd be like if they made a Hasbro vs Capcom, and people complained that there were no Star Wars characters in it. Sure, Hasbro makes plenty of Star Wars merchandise, but they can't call shots like that.
Moreover, just because the game doesn't have characters you recognize does not mean that it isn't top quality. Remember Marvel vs Capcom 2? It had a ton of characters people recognized, and it was a glitchy, unbalanced, broken mess because they rushed the game out before they lost that Marvel license.
Tatsunoko vs Capcom is one of the few games on the Wii that competes with PS3/360 games. I'd damn sure take it over Super Street Fighter IV. It's the one and only reason I'm looking for a Wii right now.
No, Nintendo is inviting everyone to the party, but everyone thinks that their party will suck.
Either you're being paid to say that, you're being sarcastic, or you have no idea what accurate information is.
1. Nintendo rolled out black wiis and a new more form-fitting classic controller for the release of Monster Hunter Tri. That isn't being unfriendly. Releasing new 1st party hardware for a 3rd party game is probably the most friendly act I have ever seen from a 1st party.
2. Using the Conduit, an unproven new IP that turned out very mediocre, and DS:E, a game that immediately garnered a bad raputation for being a rail shooter (a genre about as "hardcore" as the tanks minigame from wii play) as a test of the hardcore market is about as logical as using the Bionic Commando remake as a test of the Xbox 360's hardcore market. At least use something a fan of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games would be willing to buy. Heck, there are remakes of core games that are a better test of the market than those two titles.
3. The market is more than mini-games and hardcore, but there are many 3rd party minigame compilations that have sold millions. Honestly, I'm surpirsed because I didn't think the genre was very popular. But Carnival Games, Deca Sports, Game Party, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Big Beach Sports have proven me otherwise by each selling over a million copies.
4. There is a very obvious way for 3rd party developers to get news of their games out; it's called television. People who don't spend all day on gaming forums watch it, see things that they want advertised, and buy stuff with if nothing else the knowledge that the game's developers and publishers considered it valuable enough to spend money advertising it. So far, developers and publishers of third party efforts have shown me that they do not consider their "good" wii games all that good through the way they don't have enough faith in their titles to actually spend part of the marketting budget and get a TV slot for the titles. I have yet to see a 3rd party wii marketting campaign approach a 3rd party PS3 marketting campaign.
The purpose of a crossover series is traditionally about fanservice. The purpose of Super Smash Bros. is that fans want to see a bunch of their favorite characters together, which is also the purpose of Mario and Sonic and the Olympic games, the "Sonic and Sega All Stars" series and the "vs. Capcom" series. Sure the game can and like all games should be good, but the idea is that you should bring two or more popular series together or else there isn't really a reason to have a crossover.
Typically, the true measure of quality is not the mechanics of a game. The true measure of quality is determined by the effect the game has on the player. If the player want to keep playing, the game is good. If not, the game is bad. And the expectation a player brings to a crossover series is that the player will get access to character matchups to which they would not normally have access. Disney would have been a better idea for a versus game than Tatsunoko in that reguard, because as a gamer I am much more likely to want a game where I can stage fights between Disney characters than a game where I can stage fights between characters I have never seen or heard of before.
Tatsunoko's deadly flaw is that as good as it may be, I as a gamer am not interested in fighting with characters I've never heard of. The problem is compounded when you remember that it is in the shadow of Smash Bros., which is full of characters I as a gamer am interested in playing.
Do keep in mind that Capcom is a Japanese company. Tatsunoko is also a Japanese company. They never had ANY intention of bringing this to the West - it wasn't until there began to be a huge demand for it that it got brought over.
So, you don't know Tatsunoko. Big deal. The target audience did. Even if you don't know Tatsunoko, the fact that anyone would dismiss it because they don't know the characters is saddening. Did you know that you can enjoy a game that has a cast of characters you haven't been exposed to for many years prior?
Juri hasn't been in a game before Super Street Fighter IV, but you don't see many people complaining about her. The entire cast of BlazBlue never appeared in a previous game. Why can't you look at this as a whole new cast of playable characters, instead of just a bunch of people you don't recognize?
A crossover game needs a lot more than fan-service to succeed. You won't see to many people singing the praises of DreamMix TV: World Fighters. Was it because they lacked fan-service? Hell no - I can think of no greater fan-service than seeing Solid Snake duke it out with Optimus Prime. But the game sucked.
I would much rather play a crossover game where I don't know any of the characters that was good, than one where I know every character and yet it exists only to suck my money away.
80% of market analysis is common sense. 15% is math. 5% is being right.
As long as the [few?] people who still want to make -games- for the Wii do just that, good. If this means that they can get noticed easier somehow [without all of the other crap clogging the shelves], then great. Guess we'll need to wait and see.
@Holmes: Ironic maybe, awesome? you bet your ass! that might finally prove Capcom and other 3rd parties that their games don't sell just because they release them on the Wii but because they have been low effort shit so far.
Best regards, Anna, CEO of iscsi gigabit ethernet and i tunes