Nintendo Shares Up, But Do Devs 'Get' the Wii?

kukyfrope writes "Nintendo shares have jumped over six percent since the Wii's unveiling at E3 last week." Despite both Peter Moore and Phil Harrison recommending you should get a Wii, the future of Nintendo and the Wii aren't assured. Next Generation reports that third party developers may not really 'get' the ambitious console.

Good Point

[MBCook]

I saw this earlier and he has a good point. There haven't been many games announced for the Wii by 3rd parties. Red Steel, Madden, Super Monkey Ball, and Sponebob are all I can think of off the top of my head. There will be more, but not at launch (we're not even sure about the above).

Nintendo will have a ton of great games (good for them, they usually have a few, things are looking great here) but while EA made out like a bandit on the 360 launch (Madden, Fight Night, Burnout, whatever) there is just Nintendo here.

Of course, if they could get Super Smash Brothers out at launch (instead of a few months later as I think they said) then they could really cream the competition.

A $200 system (just a guess) with a new Mario, Super Smash Brothers, Zelda, Metroid, Wario Ware, and a few other titles at launch. What gamer could possibly resist that?

Nintendo DS

[conigs]

Wasn't this the same issue with the DS when it first launched?

If I recall (I'm too lazy to look anything up and I'm about to leave work), the DS had limited (if any) 3rd party support at launch. Everyone claimed the device was gimicky and no one would use it. It took a while before we saw games that took real advantage of the hardware.

I believe this is the case with the Wii as well. The first year of the device will see a lot of 1st party support with interesting games, but the 3rd party developers will use that time to figure out what the hell to do with it. Don't get me wrong, I fully intend on picking one up on or near launch (which I've never done for anything). However, I fully expect to only have a few titles that really make use of the new control scheme.

The problem is vastly different capabilities

[DrDitto]

The big problem is that game developers like to develop a game for all the consoles in a given generation. The hardware capabilities between the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube were different, but in the same ballpark.

Now I'm not a graphics guru and could be wrong, but to my understanding, this greatly eases the art pipeline-- for example textures and polygon counts could be the same size.

The problem with the Wii is that it is not in the same class as the Xbox360 and PS3.

Many people don't realize that for a given game, as much as 3/4 of the manpower goes into art and *not* code. Most developers leverage existing game engines. A friend of mine is on a project where they have ~ 40 artists and ~ 10 coders.

Ask the right question.

[Ant P.]

What are Nintendo doing to get the devs? Part of the reason they've historically had poor 3rd-party support is because they make it _hard_ for outsiders to get in.

Re:Ask the right question.

[Traiklin]

well for starters they are making their devkit cost only $2,000. if that doesn't make developers go "sure we will make a game for you" I don't know what will.

Especially since Microsoft's devkit costs around $50,000 - $100,000 (last I read) and the PS3 devkit is something like $16 million.

Smash Brothers

[EdwinBoyd]

The delay for Smash Bros. may be intentional. This was a 'must have' game for the Cube but as mentioned previously does not really take advantage of the Wii's unique features. Perhaps Nintendo thought it best to launch games that highlight the controller first before bringing in the tried and true favourites.

Mod parent -1 WRONG

[Solra Bizna]

The Nintendo Wii's video card does support vertex and pixel shaders. It just doesn't support really really advanced vertex and pixel shaders. Did you see the preview for Super Smash Brothers Brawl?

-:sigma.SB

Yes I got a question.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Do you know what FUD means?

I see it a lot nowadays mostly as an indicator someone doesn't agree with something. That doesn't mean it is FUD. Anymore then someone having a different opinion is a troll or someone having an argument is flaming.

Nintendo consistently builds better products? WHAAAAHAAA. Yeah right. That is why Sony took them for a ride with the PS1. Sorry but no. Nintendo screwed up badly in the past and had to pay the price. But then you mention apple. So I get my own word that lost all meaning to rebutt your fud.

FANBOY.

Re:They Will, Eventually

[BenjyD]

Considering that the Wii launch titles seem to include the new Zelda, the long-awaited new Mario and Metroid Prime 3. That's got to be 5 million sales right there.

Re:The problem is vastly different capabilities

[Erwos]

"the geometry in the image will be as high as anything on the PS3/XBox 360, the Textures are as high resolution as anything on the PS3/XBox 360 and the Particle effects are as nice as anything on the PS3/XBox 360"

This is, at best, wishful thinking. The Wii has very little in the way of texture memory - if they do what they did to the rest of the system, about a meg and a half, but let's assume it's really 10mb. The 360 has 512mb of shared RAM - presumably, more than 64mb of this could be dedicated to textures. The CPU is running at 729mhz last I checked, which is 1/3 of _one_ of the 360's cores - good luck trying to generate the same geometry. Even if you could, the comparatively low resolution (480p) is going to make it look like a jaggy mess - and there's not exactly much power to spare for fancy AA.

There is some serious delusion on the part of some Nintendo fans on how well this system is really going to be able to compete in the graphics department. I personally don't think it matters - Nintendo has obviously staked the system on the controller and Virtual Console, not the graphics. Whether that's a mistake or not, we shall see...

-Erwos

Re:Good Point

[MBCook]

Those are all announced. While there are quite a few there, I don't think many of them will be big "must have" type titles. More important though is which of those are launch titles. We actually know very little about what is a launch title and what is not right now.

Re:Ask the right question.

[the_humeister]

Any links? Perhaps my googling skills aren't up to par, but I've not been able to confirm any of those figures

Exaggerating a Little?

[Swordsmanus]

Uhh according to this article - http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3story.html?sid=614915 4 [gamespot.com]

"THQ president and CEO Brian Farrell spoke about developing for the Nintendo Wii, touching on a number of topics including THQ's first reactions to its Wii games..."

"...[The Wii] wasn't a whole new programming environment," Farrell said. "So we had a lot of tools and tech that work in that environment. So those costs--and again, I hate these broad generalizations--but they could be as little as a third of the high-end next-gen titles... Maybe the range is a quarter to a half."

Spinning a way out of E3

[killbill!]

Whenever I hear both Microsoft and Sony advising consumers to buy a Wii as a second console, I hardly see that as an endorsement. Instead, I can see fear in their eyes. Fear that consumers are going to buy a Wii first.
The huge splash Nintendo made at E3 has spin masters frantically running for cover. They're trying to downplay the Wii as good enough only as a secondary console. But even they feel the former Revolution is going to be a coup.

As for third-party developers, I'm planning to buy a Wii on launch day and at least 4 games (Metroid, Mario, Zelda and Red Steel, maybe Wii Sports). That's enough quality gaming right here to prevent me from actually seeing the light of day for the next few months, and I'm not even counting the countless classics on the Virtual Console.

The Wii is not suffering from a lack of titles. Actually, it already has too many strong launch titles to even let me try an unknown third-party game. Out of my 4/5 launch titles, only one is from a third party. The publishers that missed the boat have only themselves to blame.

Re:Smash Brothers

[edwdig]

The lead producer of Smash Bros left Nintendo (the HAL division specifically) within the past few years. Nintendo didn't ask him to head the new Smash Bros project until after their announcement last year that there would be a new Smash Bros at launch. They didn't even start forming a development team until about a year ago, so it was extremely optimistic to expect the game to be ready in time for the launch. SSBM was an *extremely* well polished game, so I really doubt they'd want to rush the followup.

Who will be the first big new dev?

[SlappyBastard]

One thing I think folks are overlooking is that each leap in console tech brings one or two new developers to the front.

Does the Wii have the potential to propel someone new, who "gets" the Wii remote control, to the forefront?

Only time will tell.

But, I like the bold, eveocative nature of the Wii controller. It speaks well of Nintendo to be thinking of things other than polygons and shaders.