Nintendo releases good titles, it can just be hard to get excited about most of them. I put that on a lack of marketing, not necessarily a lack of quality. Sure, we got plenty of games from the Wii in 2010, but how would we even know which ones were worth buying if we didn't frequent the Wii sections of Gamespot or IGN? The "casual player" that Nintendo's gone after for most of this cycle isn't going to latch onto E3 news as much as we do, even if they know what E3 is.
Of course, this isn't always the case; whenever a balance board, M+, or Mii mini-game collection comes out, we're flooded with hype about how it'll revolutionize gaming forever. But third-party devs get no help in advertising their stuff cause Nintendo doesn't feel they're worth the risk. And if Nintendo doesn't show confidence in the ones that do a good(or wonderful) job, why should anyone else? How does Nintendo expect innovation from other companies to move them forward when they refuse to weed out the junk software and let the good games make more of an impact?
It's quite obvious that, unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo isn't dependent on 3rd-party devs to stay afloat. Nintendo is very unique in that it has a heavy roster of first-party franchises to pull games from, but truth be told, I'll probably never buy another Mario game again. It's a good franchise; it just gets old after awhile. And while I'm really looking forward to Skyward Sword, if there aren't enough differences to set it apart from it's predecessors it may be the last Zelda I buy. Now, remember, this is just me talking. I'm not suggesting that everyone else feels that way, I just think Nintendo could be doing a little more to help new ideas grow along with their own.
Kojo222
I wouldn't necessarily say that Sony is dependent on third parties. Sony has a lot of first party studios. Liverpool, Evolution, Media Molecule, Santa Monica Studio, Sucker Punch, Naughty Dog, Guerrila, Zipper, Sony backs up the new studios started by people who used to be part of the Incognito studio, Team Ico, Prolyphony Digital, Sandiego Studo, Bend Studio, and a few others. Anyway, why should the people Nintendo waste money on promoting 3rd party games instead of its own game? All companies push their brands more so than a third party. When you go to staples, the sales people there push the staples brand of all the merchandise. Nintendo is going to push the games that the company itself produces because it means more money for the developers.
Nintendo has always gone its own direction. Nintendo has never catered to third parties. This dates back to the NES days. Nintendo put restrictions on how many games third parties could release at a given time. This the reason some companies put development teams under a different name. They did this in order to bypass Nintendo's restriction. This is the reason Konami was able to put so many games on the NES. Ultra games was a spinoff company that was a subsidiary of Konami. Ultra developed the Ninja Turtle games and others. The only reason third party support was on the NES is because they got locked into a contract into making games exclusively with Nintendo. Two major regions of the world chose the NES as their preferred console. The only time Nintendo was influenced by third parties is when Mortal Kombat came out. Nintendo lost a lot of sales due to the lack of gore in the SNES version of the first MK. When the second game came out, Nintendo changed its tune regarding video game violence.
Why should Nintendo care about third parties now when it never has before? When games like Mario Galaxy and Zelda sell between 5-10 million, why should Nintendo care about games made by third parties. Mario Kart, and Mario Bros sell in between 20-30 million, why should Nintendo care? The company has already made 10 billion times over than what it costs to make the Wii a reality.
The same goes with Sony, only to a lesser extent. Why should Sony shell out millions for DLC when the comapany can more money off of first party titles? The first Little Big Planet sold like 5 million copies. Killzone 2 sold close to 3 million. Resistance 1 sold over 3 million, and the second sold a little less. When both the first party games of Nintendo and Sony sell millions, why should they bother with third parties? Paying off third parties does not pay off in the end. Look at what has happened to Microsoft. The company paid 50 million for exclusive DLC in GTA 4 only for the content to go multiplat later on. Look at the Call of Duty map pack for Black Ops. Microsoft only had it for a month before it went multiplat. So, is it really in Nintendo's best interest to help third parties advertise?
Log in to comment