1. Nintendo has never aggressively pursued 3rd-parties. Mostly because Nintendo's success has never been tied too closely to them. That will probably continue.
Exactly and I see no reason that this will not continue. What was the last big 3rd party mature game for Ninty? Resident Evil Zero is the best i could think of (and Resi 4 xplatform) and that was made in the 1990s.
Top selling games for DS - all ninty, Gameboy - all ninty bar maybe some namco and tetris, Wii - all ninty with maybe a dance game chucked in? Gamecube - all ninty bar the resident Evil games scraping into the top 25ish, N64 - all ninty bar some Rare developed games. You have to go back to the SNES in the early to mid 90s to get anything resembling 3rd party support for Nintendo.
2. The Wii had a very different audience compared to a traditional console. I would bet that Nintendo plans on keeping this audience, but I wouldn't be so sure that they'll be focusing on it to the exclusion of normal audiences again - they've now seen what that did to the longevity of the Wii and it's library. So this could go either way.
See above, i'd argue Ninty have been stewing in their own (very profitable) juices for 3 consoles over 15 years. The Wii merely put the icing on the cake, huge success and profit for ninty through hardware and some software sales. Anyone else investing in the tech has struggled.
3. The Wii was drastically under-powered compared to other consoles. We have no idea how much of a factor that will be this time around, since we don't know anything about it's competition yet. It's possible that Sony and Microsoft will continue with the 10-year lifespan they've both mentioned for their current consoles. In that case, this Wii2 will be the most powerful console for several years. If Sony and Mmicrosoft don't choose to take it lying down, and release successors sometime soon, we don't know how much of a technical leap they'll take, nor do we know what sort of audience they'll be going for. The Kinect and Move have targeted the same audience that the Wii has captured, so it's quite likely that they'll continue in that vein - meaning that, to keep prices attractive to casual gamers, they won't be huge technical jumps.
Sony were always in the PS3 for the long road, and sales show they are now leading month on month, it's taken a long time and by the end I reckon they may get close to Wii sales totals, but with vastly increased 3rd party game sales. Xbox will probably get close too. If Ninty come in with a similar or slightly superior specced machine, why would anyone but a fan of nintendo games buy one?
If they make it easy to port games from PS/XBox, then i'll concede I can see some cheap ports being done, but I don't believe it will be in any 3rd party devs top priority list. They know Ninty don't care about 3rd parties, and more importantly that ninty don't need them.
Either way, the inferiority of the Wii2 hardware is not something we can call either way just yet. And it was the single biggest factor.
So no, "not a chance" is jumping the gun a little bit.
Nintendo's next console on the way
- 25/04/2011 08:13:02 AM
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here's hoping the console will support more mature rated, third party developers... *NM*
- 25/04/2011 08:28:35 AM
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Not a chance...
- 25/04/2011 01:28:43 PM
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Why do you say that?
- 25/04/2011 03:15:34 PM
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When was the last good 3rd party mature game made?
- 29/04/2011 12:46:13 AM
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I'll concede the point with games specifically rated M. Although that's a strange line to draw
- 29/04/2011 02:49:31 AM
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Press release today confirming that it's in development, out in 2012, and will be shown at E3.
- 25/04/2011 03:16:38 PM
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Yes... but will it play DVDs? /snark 
- 25/04/2011 07:57:18 PM
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- 25/04/2011 07:57:18 PM
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Funny thing is, the Wii can read DVDs. All it would take is a firmware update. *NM*
- 26/04/2011 02:42:41 AM
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Yeah. I had tinkered around with some Homebrew to get it working.
- 26/04/2011 03:25:17 AM
587 Views
I really hope that they don't delay skyward sword for this..
- 26/04/2011 02:07:55 AM
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