News: Nintendo: 3rd Parties Will Get Stronger on Wii Page 1

Nintendo: 3rd Parties Will Get Stronger on Wii

30.01.2008

A translation of Nintendo's 3rd Quarter financial report has revealed that the company believes the problem with Third Party developers struggling to take advantage of the Wii's power is simply because it is a 'young system'.

"When we develop new hardware at Nintendo, we do so as a collaboration between the hardware development teams and the software development teams. Our software sales percentage is currently high because our internal teams teams know the Wii's special characteristics best, and they started development quite a bit before the Wii's release.

"If you look at the data for our third quarter you'll see that, out of the 14 Wii titles that shipped over a million units, 11 of those were our titles. However, if you look at the 50 titles that shipped over a million units on DS, only 28 of those are ours. We identified the same thing in the DS' first period, and the situation continues to change little by little. For the Wii too, we believe that as time passes, the proportion of high-selling titles that come from our licensees will increase."

So technically Third Parties should start to churn out more impressive games in the near future, just like there was a marked improvement in the quality of DS games starting with the likes of Final Fantasy III and Tales of the Tempest (in terms of graphical prowess).

Will Third Parties really start putting more effort into Wii games even though mini/party games are selling so well? Let us know your thoughts on the matter...

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Simes 30.01.2008#1

I also remembered waiting for decent games to come out on ds without the the ps1 looking graphics (ridge racer ds, need for speed) Then when I got mario kart and sonic rush i knew ds was going to be even greater and get loads of support. Just wait till that get the hang of things. I'm not worried because games like Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes and the Resi's have been great third party efforts. Just waiting for World of Goo, Fragile, The Force Unleashed, Sadness and No More Heroes this month!

psychedout 30.01.2008#2

This is good news because I can have good quality games for the Wii. Hope the games would be excellent.

i love playing video games and listening to cool music

squeek 30.01.2008#3

Current thoughts:

Massive third party teams that have invested heavily already in making Hi-Def games will continue to do so, and cross release on 360/PS3/PC to compensate for the fact PS3/360 haven't got a large user base everywhere. They may move some talented people onto Wii projects, probably in smaller numbers to come up with less 'blockbuster' games (ie Space Marine alien shooter 7, car racing 5, RPG 8), but come up with some neat original ideas as there's less commercial pressure to stick with a well known forumla to ensure you'll get a return for the money invested.

Small development teams will want to work on the wii, enabling them to experiment with ideas, expand their ideas at a low cost. Hopefully we'll see a lot of these on WiiWare for a lowish price and they'll sell well. World of Goo comes to mind as something I've seen recently that fits this, I know it's based on a PC demo/game, but games like this should come around, and their graphical style will make up for any lack of HD.

Some 3rd party games will be big and take a long time (in man hours) to make. These will probably happen once some of the big 3rd parties have good engines for the wii already, which may be next year?

Nintendo are wanting to make 1.8 million wiis a month this year (I think), if they sell all of them and keep going there's going to become a point where you can make a wii game for less cost than other machines, and you need to sell to a much smaller percentage of the installed base to make the same money. The high up business men are going to realise this and move some games towards the platform.

I think due to the image Nintendo put out the Wii will always have quicker/more simple games released on it, and mini game collections. But a lot of these simpler games are at a reduced cost so I don't see the problem really, I've bought geometry wars this week for

Darkflame 30.01.2008#4

3rd partys will sale more if they put more effort in, its that simple.

Its no excuse for them to say "Nintendo sales too good!
They should stop releaseing things like Galaxy and Corruption!!!"

"Some 3rd party games will be big and take a long time (in man hours) to make. These will probably happen once some of the big 3rd parties have good engines for the wii already, which may be next year?"

Wii engines dont take much effort to make really, as the artitecture is essentialy a gamecube.
Thats not a reflection of power, meerly chip design. Assets could be scaled up a lot due more ram and faster chip, but code dosnt need to change much.

I think its much more a question of when

a) The PS2 finaly starts to fall. (and so the Wii isnt bundeled with a system almost 2 gens behind it)

b) Publishers realise their heavy investments in PS3 development where a bit missplaced.

This is a slow process, as investment into the other systems was so huge.

Its like a big truck with lots of momentum, its hard to turn around quickly and go the other way.

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Simes 30.01.2008#5

Your right Darkflame like the Dreamcast the PS2 wasn't a true 128bit computer like the XBOX and GCN were. This is why games look so shoddy when ported to wii from ps2. Hopefully Okami and Bully will look great. When I heard that Force Unleashed was getting its own version on Wii, I was like YESSS. Then I saw a list say it was coming to PS2 I was like F***. Only because I know it's gonna be sent from the PS2 upwards.

Jump_button 30.01.2008#6

well Fatal Frame come to wii with Suda 51 at the weel

My ART Gallery la la la la!

Marco_V 30.01.2008#7

i totally agree with you all, to many people seem to go oh nintendo are to good they are making 3rd party games look bad in comparison.

Well if they were producing good games of near nintendo quality to start with we woudl not have this problem. Im glad that there are 3rd partys out there whoa re doing the business as listed above as they porve that its not only nintendo that can make good games on the wii.

Wii ware will help open all of this up, as smaller companies will be able to design, develop, build and put out quality small games on the Wii at a fraction of the cost, and i do believe most of these games will be alot better than most of the shovelware available on the wii so far.

cant wait to see the final builds of World of Goo and Fragile as well both look great amongs about another 10 gams i can think off too.