This news from GameIndustry.biz is right up my alley: an analyst calling out lazy third party developers for producing utter schlock for, or bypassing entirely, the Wii.
In response to comments made by Todd Mitchell of Kaufman Bros. Equity Research, IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon basically smacks the man around the room for appeasing developers that lack the ability to innovate (of which, IMO, there are many today). For background, Mitchell recently said that Nintendo’s wild success with the Wii and the DS “bodes poorly” for publishers for reasons I can’t comprehend because I aced Logic 101 in college.
According to Pidgeon:
“Nintendo’s success in bringing video games to a wider audience is a strong positive for the entire games industry. On a basic level, more gamers means more sales. The idea that Nintendo is bad for third-party publishers is a myth with roots in the 8bit -16bit days when Nintendo and Sega manufactured cartridges and the third party publishers felt they got short shrift in the production line,” he continued.”
Pidgeon goes on to argue that With N64 and GameCube, Nintendo suffered from a lack of third-party support and was inundated with third party titles that were slapped together ports of games for other systems.
That’s no longer the case with the DS or the Wii however, as much as it may have seemed that way in the first six months. What’s different this time, and what ensures that Wii is guaranteed a slew of third party efforts in the near future, is that Nintendo is on the rise, and is almost assured a 12 million+ user base by this time next year (or more. I’m being uncharacteristically conservative this morning…).
Pidgeon concludes: “Careless publishers will suffer, as they should.” Indubitably. You put out crap on a Nintendo system, and Nintendo is going to bury you. You put out crap on a successful Nintendo system? Then the *new* Nintendo fan base, now millions strong and growing, will bury you too.
Note: Yup, that was a Flintstones vitamin reference in there somewhere.