Tonche said:
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl have dropped out for the time being. What's their LTD?
~5.1 million by May 13th from Famitsu's numbers.
Mariah Carey said:
I'm thinking that especially in Japan third parties are becomnig increasingly irrelevant to Wii's success. In Japan third parties could support PS3 with all their might and Wii would not only still crush the PS3 but a lot of third party developers themselves as well. I think tastes in gaming there have simply shifted massively and the PS3 is just ill-equipped to deal with it.
nextgeneration said:
Yup, if not for Nintendo, the video game market in Japan would be in bad, bad shape. Nintendo is the only one that will expand this industry. Sony's not going to do that. Neither is Microsoft.
I agree.
Masklinn said:
...In the end, the only things in your list that affect the gameplay are clearly connectivity, where the Wii has as much potential as the PS3 (and doesn't come close to the 360), and potentially the physics even though their impact right now is fairly minimal beyond eye candy (woot I can destroy crates!). The only places where I saw actual physics being useful were 3D "realistic" RTS and RTTs such as Total Annihilation, and even then the physics was only interesting to the hardcore.
Loonz said:
...All of those supposed "technological advantages" of having more processing power won't matter if there isn't money to be made. The original Xbox trounced the PS2, technically speaking, it had games that looked almost next gen (Riddick Chronicles, SC3), and only a few cared about that.
Exactly.
And, WOW at this thread!! And so many posts in general lately.
I can appreciate HD graphics, amazing physics, and all the other advantages more power brings, but these things are irrelevant to the mainstream, they're just not responding to these improvements. It sucks for those who really want this, I know, but, tough, seriously.
There are so many posts talking about how Nintendo should've gone HD, but why the **** should they when the market a) doesn't give a shit, and b) isn't big enough to sustain the increased costs? I'm not talking about personal preference, I'm talking about creating a sustainable business model which creates enough profit so companies can pay wages, so people can survive; this is the bottom line.
Artistic vision is a crock of shit if consumers don't care. Wii is growing in popularity everywhere because the mass market's opinion of what videogames are is totally different from the hardcore's view. We bitch and whine a lot, but we're irrelevant when it comes to dictating sales.
These traditional experiences, on the whole, are either declining in sales or remaining static, the world over, yet budgets are skyrocketing. This is a shit business model. Saying 'oh well, ____ might not sell as much as the last one, but it'll do okay', isn't what shareholders want to hear. They want things like, 'expanded audience' because if equates to financial security, 'manageable development costs' because it's reasonable risk, and 'increase in sales' because it means more profits.
Sony and MS's plan wasn't to do
okay and increase the retail of games so they
don't lose too much money, it was to sell more sw and hw than they ever have, and they thought better graphics and more processing power would do this. Nothing about 360 or PS3 is doing any of these things at the moment, yet for many developers DS is, which is remarkably similar to Wii, regardless of how many people thought it wouldn't be.
The way threads are turning out wouldn't be so comical if we hadn't seen this movie before.