The Continuing Saga of Third-Party Wii Development

Gamasutra has some thoughts from game developers, executives, and industry watchers this week about third-party Wii development, and how the industry seems to be slowly coming to grips with how to sell games on Nintendo's platform.

The piece paints an interesting picture of how the divide between game developers' predilections towards hard-core games and their understanding of casual consumers' wants and needs seems to be narrowing, as in this story from the development of the Wii version of Ubisoft's Shaun White Snowboarding:

For instance, the testers seemed to have problems using their balance board to jump onto a rail. The team decided to code an "automatic magnet" on the rail so all the snowboarder had to do was move near the rail and the jump would happen automatically.

"We were then concerned that we'd eliminated some of the challenge," says Guignard, "but the testers seemed pleased."

The article also points out that -- surprise! -- when faced with a wall full of games and no clue what to buy, the new consumer will gravitate towards familiar licenses. Analyst Michael Pachter:

For example, I thought THQ's de Blob was a really great Wii game but Ubisoft's The Price Is Right outsold it 3-to-1. So did THQ's Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader: Make The Grade. That's sad. But it tells you who the audience is.

Is it "sad"? I suppose. But "artsy hard-core game in a new franchise gets outsold by a slapdash game with a strong license" happens every day on every platform. Iron Man for PSP was garbage, and in December it outsold... well, pretty much every PSP game you like. Crisis Core? God of War? Neither even charted.

Don't get me wrong -- the last thing I want to do is appear to trivialize just how difficult a job it must be to rethink one's game design processes and approach to creating new game brands for Wii. I wonder what established casual game publishers' experiences would be, though, versus publishers that have spent the last few decades making games for a different type of consumer.

Of course, as game publishers continue to learn these lessons, the amount of games they develop for the core audience -- the fan of Nintendo's traditional games -- will likely decrease. So it falls, again, on Nintendo itself to keep those gamers supplied with entertainment, which it does not seem particularly keen on doing, these days.

With both core gamers and game developers not having an especially high opinion of Wii these days, it bears remembering that the average Wii consumer is, from all appearances, actually quite happy with their purchase.
Can You Create a Must-Have Wii Game? [Gamasutra]