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Media Create Sales: Nov 30-Dec 6, 2009
- Thread starter Chris1964
- Start date
LINK.AGE76
Member
markatisu said:
Good point, 3rd party support is very weak in Japan.
i think basara sales might be better then a lot of people thinkLINK.AGE76 said:
there seems to be a sengoku jidai boom right now between japanese women.. the sengoku musou 3 wii sales are a testament to that...
but who knows if that sengoku jidai boom is going on till the release..
Nirolak said:
The latter seems far more logical than the former. In fact, the former makes almost no sense whatsoever. What would those reticent studios be doing otherwise? Just sitting there?
Canceled and/or reworked projects are simply a fact of life in any creative medium. If your master plan only suceeds when every studio finishes their game on time and produces a highly succesful product, then you probably planned wrong in the first place.
Nintendo is opening new studios, to my knowledge. At the very least, we know about that Sora team, and we also know Nintendo has increased their overall headcount by nearly 25% in the last three years: that doesn't necessitate new teams, but I think it's quite unlikely that they hired 25% to provide nothing but overhead. As usual, they're proceeding at their slow and deliberate pace.
LINK.AGE76
Member
farnham said:
I think Basara 3 will be released the same week as the premier of the second season of the show, which is the 2nd of April I believe. I do believe it will sell better, but I think the majority of sales will be on the PS3.
I guess it could be development issues. But I mean, the following studios all seem to be facing development issues or seem to be doing things for other companies lately:schuelma said:
Retro Studios
NST
Genius Sonority
Brownie Brown
HAL Laboratory
ND Cube
Some of these are explainable like Brownie Brown doing everything for Level 5, but a lot of the rest of these are rather mysteriously missing in action relative to the date of their last game release.
Sometimes they let third parties use their teams for games that appear on their platforms. That's what I meant by not using them directly. Sorry I was unclear there.Opiate said:
jay said:
There are two scenarios. The first is the "non-sceptical" scenario, whereby we use past evidence to determine what will happen in the future. On the one hand, we have Nintendo's tendency to be secret about their release schedules, especially when concerning smaller titles. On the other, we have the fact that Nintendo is happy to have gaps in their release schedules (or, at the very least, does so begrudgingly but often). (Whether or not this should be expected of Nintendo, as Opiate is discussing, is irrelevant.) The problem here is that the current evidence under-determines our conclusions, as the lack of information regarding Nintendo's upcoming schedule may mean either that we know they don't have anything or that we don't know that they have something. As a result, on the basis of past evidence, our conclusion (on the basis of history) may vary from "yes, Nintendo will release more games in Q1" to "no, Nintendo will not release more games in Q1", depending upon how much weight we assign to certain factors, and whether or not we should do so.
The other, sceptical scenario is more or less "we don't (and can't) know because history may not repeat itself".
Both scenarios may arrive at the same conclusion, but you cannot use a sceptical scenario to support a non-sceptical one. The confusion may have been caused by me not being very clear in my original posts, so I apologise on that account.
Unless I'm mistaken this page is showing Nd Cube actively recruiting: http://www2.ndcube.co.jp/recruit/index.htmlSadist said:
Nirolak said:
I thought NST had most recently worked on Mario vs DK 3. Not sure about the other guys. HAL might be assisting Sora, or of course, there's always that Kirby game!
As far as Retro goes, I really believe that at one point, they were tasked with making a Zelda game. I'd have to see the rest of their offices, but from my experience you usually don't put up artwork of video games on the wall unless they're ones you're working on or have worked on.
Even I'm getting sick of talking about Nintendo and the Wii.
Any other discussions? FF13 anyone? I'm actually very excited for the release..I think its wildcard in terms of how well its going to do.
I'm going to go with 1.6M LTD.
Any other discussions? FF13 anyone? I'm actually very excited for the release..I think its wildcard in terms of how well its going to do.
I'm going to go with 1.6M LTD.
thestopsign
Member
I think Nintendo could stick in Monado for a Q1 2010 release or maybe Q2. They also have Span Smasher, "Kirby", and Line Attack Heroes waiting in the wings. Galaxy 2 at best is a Golden Week release, or maybe late June like Wii Sports Resort. Then after that, everything is up in the air.
schuelma, I think XIII will get 1.7m LTD.
schuelma, I think XIII will get 1.7m LTD.
I've kept my excitement on anything FFXIII related low thanks to the people in charge, but like Pokemon, I'll probably buy it and enjoy it for at least that one play through. Should be a decent switch from all the WRPGs I've been playing recently anyway.
NST is/was mostly filled with DigiPen grads, right?
Shiggy said:
NST is/was mostly filled with DigiPen grads, right?
Relaxed Muscle
Member
Nintendo could do help improve the situation on 3rd party support, if third parties dosn't come to you, then you go to get them, Nintendo is clearly a very healthy publisher, they can finance 3rd party games and release them, and no, giving a low budget team like sandlot a few bucks just shows how much care about having 3rd party support.
But the truth is probably they don't care, Wii is a very successful system, and just SMBW will sell more Wii's than most 3rd party releases they could finance or publish.So being so conservative as they are is probably a better deal release their games and ignore every effort in getting 3rd party support, which clearly seems more than enough to give them the leadership in the industry.
But the truth is probably they don't care, Wii is a very successful system, and just SMBW will sell more Wii's than most 3rd party releases they could finance or publish.So being so conservative as they are is probably a better deal release their games and ignore every effort in getting 3rd party support, which clearly seems more than enough to give them the leadership in the industry.
Moor-Angol
Banned
markatisu said:
Q4 2009 showed us many games bombed on Wii, many were from 3rd parties, but also Sin & Punishment 2 and Mario & Sonic really did bad.
There are more than 9 million Wii's sold over Japan, and it's still difficult to see 3rd party games reaching 100k... you know how many games reached 100k on PS2 ?
Ok, new Mario will sell like cakes, but it's just one game among poor sales.
And if developers didn't invest their time and money on Wii while it was dominating the market, i wonder why they should change their plans now while PS3 is growing up week after week...
gerg said:
I am not using skeptical how you are. Taking the first scenario which you have labeled "non-skeptical," either conclusion can be drawn with some confidence based on the past. When given a situation where both outcomes are plausible you will almost inevitably take the "Nintendo delivers" position, and so I call you an optimist. Many here will take the, "Nintendo does not deliver" position and I am referring to them as skeptics.
My point is simply that I do not think you can present an argument that will make those who are skeptical look like they're taking an absurd position. Our lack of prescience, lack of knowledge of Nintendo's internal working, and any other points you have made have failed to convince me that Nintendo optimism is clearly the only reasonable choice.
Perhaps we can agree that neither of us has sufficient evidence to be entirely convinced of either case. We will have to wait and see.
Edit: After re-reading your posts I've realized you were less interested in taking an optimistic position and more in simply not agreeing that the skeptic's position was destined to unfold.
Am I wrong in thinking Best re-releases on consoles this gen have been a bit off a dud compared to last? I'm sure FFXIII's international will do very well, but for example the Yakuza 3 best release doesn't look like it'll pull off anything near 2 or 1's, and when these releases account for more than half of the total sales it takes some of the shine off a new release doing well.
I suppose the reasoning for this would be that budget re-releases mainly sell to the more "expanded" audience PS1 and PS2 had, which PS3 retained little of.
I suppose the reasoning for this would be that budget re-releases mainly sell to the more "expanded" audience PS1 and PS2 had, which PS3 retained little of.
jay said:
Fair enough.
Sure. But my position was also based on several factors, namely that I had forgotten about Golden Week. Thinking about those factors has made me reconsider my original stance, and I agree that it is very unlikely that Nintendo will have a very big game ready for release in March and another for Golden Week. I'm not sure they necessarily need to have a "big game" for both time frames, and I also wouldn't be surprised to see another, smaller game released before the end of Q1. (This might be one of their games from their 2008 conference line-up.)
I'm amazed that Nintendo's worldwide Wii plan seems to be Endless Ocean 2 for US/EU and Reginleiv for Japan. We're not talking about the summer drought here either. They're going up against the Playstation Wand in Japan and multiple Xbox 360 exclusive games in the US. Maybe they still have more announcements to make early next year or they just keep trucking untill NSMBWii runs out of gas, the Wii sinks with it and they can damage control in the investors QA again.
AniHawk said:
This is correct. Still there were quite a few people who left the studio after staying there for many years (4 or more). Colin Reed, Scott Bassett, Clark Morse, Trevor Johnson, Lee Phemister, Sun Tjen Fam - to only name a few. Many seem to go to Microsoft.
http://hoppercool.blogspot.com/2009/03/game-over.htmlBen Hopper said:
Moor-Angol said:
I don't think there is one person saying that developers should change their plans, even the most diehard fans I think have realized thats not going to happen this gen for various reasons.
I am more interested in how much hardware it moves, we know a main FF game will do well but I am not too sure just how many have not already bought the PS3
Cosmonaut X
Member
Moor-Angol said:
They're not going to. Debating the reasons behind their decisions - pre-Wii launch, during the explosive growth of the first 18 months or so and now - is really getting us nowhere as it has become painfully obvious that the Wii is going to live on Nintendo's support from now until they choose to move on to their next home system.
They aren't getting any significant support from third parties, the few odds and ends they have received - stuff like ToG, SW3 and MH3 - have either underperformed or have done well but are perceived as isolated, almost freak occurrences and it seems that - pending some miraculous eruption of third party support in the New Year - this Christmas has been the last hurrah of vaguely serious Wii efforts from Japanese third parties.
Cosmonaut X said:
Yes. The best case scenario going forward for Nintendo is that what few remaining 3rd party franchises have appeared on the system stay there. Outside of Nintendo blatantly buying 3rd party support that is the best that will happen.
schuelma said:
I've been getting more bearish on FFXIII's sales in the Western markets, so if it actually sells that little in Japan, I'm having a really hard time seeing FFXIII sell over four million units without channel stuffing. Any higher and I get the feeling we would be talking about some serious levels of channel stuffing.Stopsign said:
It would be quite interesting to see what changes Square Enix would make with the series if it actually sold that little, especially if many of the copies were sold at low prices and they got flooded with cash backs from European retailers. Though it might be an even more interesting insight if they changed nothing at all.
Of course, all this assume it sells that little in Japan and doesn't do well (for Final Fantasy) in the West, and I could be wrong on that.
Cosmonaut X
Member
[Nintex] said:
Well, Nintendo are still going to come out on top worldwide in terms of hardware sold and in terms of how much software they're going to shift. Unfortunately, it's going to be largely no thanks to third parties and the Wii catalogue is the poorer for it.
lowlylowlycook
Member
Welp, I guess I'll have to retire my Haiku soon:
I think Nintendo needs to share their secret to success more with third parties. Teach them how to effectively market games and how to properly implement a gaming concept for the Wii. Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all saying third parties are incompetent but all these third party companies are rather big and have a history of making games a certain way. The Wii is a completely different console and one that they haven't figured out yet.
Changing the way big companies think and operate is a slow process and that is what is needed with the Wii. That is why Nintendo should step in to help them in accomplishing that. I think Opiate nailed it with his posts already.
Changing the way big companies think and operate is a slow process and that is what is needed with the Wii. That is why Nintendo should step in to help them in accomplishing that. I think Opiate nailed it with his posts already.
It is weak in Japan. It's weak because their games aren't selling. Their games aren't selling because they can't market for shit. They can't market for shit because like the above poster said they need Nintendo's help.LINK.AGE76 said:
Even though there are established franchises that should do well, but we're not seeing a lot of new games from third parties.
Linkhero1 said:
I really don't think its a marketing problem. I think its pretty simple- from the beginning 3rd parties were largely absent on the Wii and by the time this year arrived with some actual high profile software it was too late.
I agree, but when I look at games like Crystal Bearers I don't feel like they pushed it enough. I remember seeing a picture where they hung a huge Crystal Bearer banner in the city. I mean what's that going to tell people who don't know anything about the game? I don't know about their tv ads either. They didn't look appealing to me at least.schuelma said:
Still I think your point is more valid than mine.
Cosmonaut X
Member
Linkhero1 said:
It's not primarily to do with marketing, IMO, although some titles - including Nintendo's - could have done with better, more expansive promotion.
The problem I see with third party software is that, while Nintendo came out swinging with big franchises or exciting new IP that was promoted well and heavily, third parties largely stumbled out of the gates with low-budget spin-offs that completely changed core gameplay (RE: UC, SW: Katana, SC: Legends etc. etc.), low-budget new IP (Elebits, for example) and PS2/GC ports. I think that this initial wave of poorly-thought-out rushjobs and cheapy ports did a lot to poison the well for future titles or sequels to that early splurge of software.
Couple this with Nintendo's own mishandling of the system during 2008 and I think the environment for third party software - outside of mega-launches like MH3 - and even smaller Nintendo software has been made very, very unwelcoming.
schuelma said:
I really don't believe there is something as too late. Nintendo games seem to do phenomenal. Why can't third parties replicate this? Its not as if third parties have less talent. Its just that the Wii user base is so diverse and has a lot of new users in them that they become unpredictable for traditional software. They need to change the way they make games for the Wii and market their games for Wii. Once the ecosystem is healthy and momentum is there, traditional stuff will sell better too (at a later stage) imo.
distantmantra
Member
Bebpo said:
If it's going to have a March release date, Capcom needs to announce it soon.
Cosmonaut X said:
Yeah. I think if this years 3rd party lineup would have been out in 2007 core gamers would have looked at the system a lot differently. This years lineup isn't amazing, but compared to the first 2 years its significantly better.