Stephen 776
perpetually tired
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Delete this post. Posted by accident
There's only one difference I've seen in Nintendo's third party strategy.
Under Iwata, most of the third party titles/ports funded by Nintendo were Japanese: Ninja Gaiden 3, Devil Third, Bayonetta 2, Fatal Frame, Yakuza, The Wonderful 101. The same could be said for 3DS - most of its third party support was Japanese like Metal Gear Solid 3, Street Fighter, Monster Hunter and Resident Evil Revelations.
Under Kimishima/Furukawa, Nintendo has opened their wallets to fund more ports from western third parties.
- Diablo 3
- Skyrim
- FIFA
- Doom + Doom Eternal
- Grand Theft Auto Trilogy
- The Witcher 3
Fifa is a super interesting case. NCL provided EA with funding to build a brand new engine (from scratch) for Fifa Switch because they couldn't get Frostbite to work on the system at the time. EA wouldn't have bothered to create a new engine for Fifa Switch if NCL hadn't funded it.
In Iwata's defense: I'm very confident Iwata would have pushed for funding more western support on Switch after what happened with Wii U.
I always saw him as a marketing tool from the industry itself.
He had his own, prominent space, made a name for himself making wacky analysis and managed to become the voice of the AAA industry. He was part of the huge push agaisnt Nintendo and the Blue Ocean strategy, and i have always thought there are some interests behind that.
It was just too timely, too precise, and he pushed agaisnt the only company that acted differently.
Even now, when he suggested that Nintendo should focus on the Switch lite, i'm sure that wasn't a random comment
Except Labo didn't really sell well.
Wii U had some decent first party support when it launched (because of Wii's success) but that lasted just for the launch phase and then it was dropped like a bad habit. The wedge between Nintendo and third parties was stronger than ever.Switch third party support is still heavily slanted towards Japanese support, it just has better support across the board.
In some ways though the Wii U enjoyed better support from Western third parties than Switch does.
Switch third party support is still heavily slanted towards Japanese support, it just has better support across the board.
In some ways though the Wii U enjoyed better support from Western third parties than Switch does.
Switch is doing so much better with third parties than the unhealthy Wii U it sounds a bit like trolling to suggest otherwise.Are you basing this entirely on Wii U having one Call of Duty game? IMO, there's more to western support than Call of Duty.
You would never see South Park (Ubisoft), Doom (Bethesda), Crysis 3 (Crytek) and Diablo 3 (Blizzard) on Wii U.
In 2012, I spoke to someone who worked at Volition. They badly wanted to bring the Saints Row games to Wii U, but porting it would've been such a hassle. So the Wii U dev kits just sat there and collected dust in their offices.
I still remember when Nintendo showed off Metro Last Light for Wii U in that E3 2011 sizzle reel. After Wii U launched, Metro Last Light's chief technical officer called the Wii U's CPU "horrible" and "slow" in an interview. It was so brutal to see a new gaming console getting raked over the coals like that.
Fast forward to today: Saints Row and Metro Last Light are now both on Switch.
Are you basing this entirely on Wii U having one Call of Duty game? IMO, there's more to western support than Call of Duty.
You would never see South Park (Ubisoft), Doom (Bethesda), Crysis 3 (Crytek) and Diablo 3 (Blizzard) on Wii U.
In 2012, I spoke to someone who worked at Volition. They badly wanted to bring the Saints Row games to Wii U, but porting it would've been such a hassle. So the Wii U dev kits just sat there and collected dust in their offices.
I still remember when Nintendo showed off Metro Last Light for Wii U in that E3 2011 sizzle reel. After Wii U launched, Metro Last Light's chief technical officer called the Wii U's CPU "horrible" and "slow" in an interview. It was so brutal to see a new gaming console getting raked over the coals like that.
Fast forward to today: Saints Row and Metro Last Light are now both on Switch.
It got things early in its life because Wii was a success and then it got nothing after the games (which were generally mediocre ports) didn't perform. It completely destroyed third party relations.Wii U got two day and date CODs, two Assassin's Creed, Arkham Origins Day 1, Watch Dogs(late), Spliter Cell, Zombi U as a launch exclusive.
It had a lot more than COD.
You can find lots of examples of devs raking the Switch over the coals too, someone actually just made a thread about what a Respawn dev said in 2017.
EDIT: Even the issue with the Saints Row and Metro comparisons is that those games were contemporary when the Wii U was the on the market. The equivalent products today aren't being released on Switch either.
It got things early in its life because Wii was a success and then it got nothing after the games (which were generally mediocre ports) didn't perform. It completely destroyed third party relations.
Switch is rebuilding them in a big way.
There is no other way to frame it.
Wii U got two day and date CODs, two Assassin's Creed, Arkham Origins Day 1, Watch Dogs(late), Spliter Cell, Zombi U as a launch exclusive.
It had a lot more than COD.
You can find lots of examples of devs raking the Switch over the coals too, someone actually just made a thread about what a Respawn dev said in 2017.
RE: Day and Date
To be fair, Switch is the first time ever that Nintendo launched a new system during the middle of a console generation. So that threw third party publishers completely off with their development cycles.
That literally has never happened before. Every previous Nintendo system has launched during the beginning of a generation. Wii launched the same year as PS3. GameCube launched same year as Xbox. Wii U launched one year before PS4 and Xbox One.
In the first 2-3 years of its life, Switch was busy playing "catch up" with PS4's library. Nintendo was actively trying to get most of the older PS4 games that Wii U missed out on: Skyrim, Doom, South Park, The Witcher 3, Overwatch, Life is Strange, LA Noire.
Switch got/is getting a lot more third party games than Wii U so it's difficult not to look a the lazy early offerings on the Wii U as anything other than vastly inferior.That's what happens when one platform sells double the lifetime sales of another in a single year.
That's irrelevant to my point though. The Switch isn't included in those big multiplatform games from third party publishers at all(except MK11?) whereas Wii U was at least to some extent.
would wholly disagree with this, what are they gonna do in terms of other priorities? make companies make certain games day and date even if it runs badly, costs them money and makes the game take longer to release? Clearly being a "late port" in the wider mainstream doesn't have that much impact on the perception of these games and in this case given switch's unique selling points are still more appealing than say day and date releases of certain titles on what was just a straight up inferior home console to anything else on the market at the time.To be honest that sounds like a case of having the wrong priorities because they've ended up missing on several years of games again, and they'll continue to do nothing but play catch up. Life is Strange is only coming to Switch around its fifth birthday.
One interesting thing I find in Nintendo's western deals is that outside FIFA and NBA2K they didn't really go for any of the western games that failed to help Wii U upfront (COD, AssCreed, Arkham, Mass Effect, Madden, Epic Mickey, etc). I wonder if that was a conscious move?There's only one difference I've seen in Nintendo's third party strategy.
Under Iwata, most of the third party titles/ports funded by Nintendo were Japanese: Ninja Gaiden 3, Devil Third, Bayonetta 2, Fatal Frame, Yakuza, The Wonderful 101. The same could be said for 3DS - most of its third party support was Japanese like Metal Gear Solid 3, Street Fighter, Monster Hunter and Resident Evil Revelations.
Under Kimishima/Furukawa, Nintendo has opened their wallets to fund more ports from western third parties.
- Diablo 3
- Skyrim
- FIFA
- Doom + Doom Eternal
- Grand Theft Auto Trilogy
- The Witcher 3
Fifa is a super interesting case. NCL provided EA with funding to build a brand new engine (from scratch) for Fifa Switch because they couldn't get Frostbite to work on the system at the time. EA wouldn't have bothered to create a new engine for Fifa Switch if NCL hadn't funded it.
In Iwata's defense: I'm very confident Iwata would have pushed for funding more western support on Switch after what happened with Wii U.
We're talking about Switch's 4 thousand plus games vs Wii U's 7 hundred and something.I agree with @Oregano to some point.
Yes, the Switch has a lot of cool support from 3rd parties, but I don't see it being so much better than what Wii U had. The difference now is that the number of indies and AA games is much bigger and Switch usually gets everything in those segments, but the AAA material is very small.
And to tell the truth, that will only change if the next hardware is closer to at least XSS. One thing that can help now is that games are much more scalable, which also has a limit.
So the fact is: AAA games will keep missing Nintendo consoles unless it's hardware gets a little closer to the industry AAA standard: Xbox and Playstation.
I think it came from a place of frustration, he seemed genuinely offended Iwata didn't take his Wii HD suggestion seriously around 2010. In hindsight, that would have been the best time to launch the Wii U instead of in 2012For years it seems he'd bet against Nintendo and rile the Nintendo fans up during his "industry analysis". I was puzzled not only by his job but that Nintendo fans would get so upset and take the bait. In retrospect, the whole thing was kind of strange.
I know he was betting against Switch in the early days but kind of showed a deep humbling after Animal Crossing hit.
He was negative during the Wii era too. People don't remember that because he played the nice guy routine during Keighley's show at the time, but his takes were as dumb back then as they are now.After the Wii era , he became very negative towards Nintendo and was right about that negativity from a certain point of view.
I feel the same way. The Switch has definitely benefited greatly from digital indie and e-shop release. But the actual number of big, cross-platform newer titles with PS and Xbox? Not much better than Wii U's. Ports and remasters (Crysis, LA Noir, etc.) make up a notable number of retail titles, yet seem to be promoted as strong third party support, meanwhile they're blips for PS/Xbox, which get a lot of brand new bigger titles to pad out their release schedules. Heck, Bethesda went out of its way to make specialized ports of their Doom and Wolfenstein titles for Switch, and now they're bought by Microsoft and we likely won't see that special consideration happen anymore.I agree with @Oregano to some point.
Yes, the Switch has a lot of cool support from 3rd parties, but I don't see it being so much better than what Wii U had. The difference now is that the number of indies and AA games is much bigger and Switch usually gets everything in those segments, but the AAA material is very small.
And to tell the truth, that will only change if the next hardware is closer to at least XSS. One thing that can help now is that games are much more scalable, which also has a limit.
So the fact is: AAA games will keep missing Nintendo consoles unless it's hardware gets a little closer to the industry AAA standard: Xbox and Playstation.
I think the thing with 3rd-party support on Wii U is that it was almost all incredibly front-loaded to the first 2 years. What ended up being released was sunk costs in development, but it was clear there was very little investment in software for that platform after the initial round of planned titles dried up. And... well, that's just not happened this time, so it hits different.I agree with @Oregano to some point.
Yes, the Switch has a lot of cool support from 3rd parties, but I don't see it being so much better than what Wii U had. The difference now is that the number of indies and AA games is much bigger and Switch usually gets everything in those segments, but the AAA material is very small.
And to tell the truth, that will only change if the next hardware is closer to at least XSS. One thing that can help now is that games are much more scalable, which also has a limit.
So the fact is: AAA games will keep missing Nintendo consoles unless it's hardware gets a little closer to the industry AAA standard: Xbox and Playstation.
I think the thing with 3rd-party support on Wii U is that it was almost all incredibly front-loaded to the first 2 years. What ended up being released was sunk costs in development, but it was clear there was very little investment in software for that platform after the initial round of planned titles dried up. And... well, that's just not happened this time, so it hits different.
But I think the big win was that, aside from perhaps the beginning of the Switch's life like the FIFA example, none of the 3rd-party games seem to have been announced and released due to cajoling or arm-twisting, and it's games that people give a shit about, no less.
The fact that last year with the Switch was the first time a Nintendo platform has had more releases than PlayStation in Japan(even counting the DS/Wii years) says a lot more about the strength of the platform when it comes to third party support than say... the port of Dying Light that just came out.
Gonna be honest, I feel like you are kinda overestimating the importance of a lot of the Japanese games that come to Switch.The Switch's third party support is light years ahead of Wii U and no one said otherwise, it's just not because of the relative handful of AAA PS4/XBO games that were ported to Switch.
The fact that last year with the Switch was the first time a Nintendo platform has had more releases than PlayStation in Japan(even counting the DS/Wii years) says a lot more about the strength of the platform when it comes to third party support than say... the port of Dying Light that just came out.
Gonna be honest, I feel like you are kinda overestimating the importance of a lot of the Japanese games that come to Switch.
Switch has close to 7000 games IIRC. Nintendo's own slides mentioned that.We're talking about Switch's 4 thousand plus games vs Wii U's 7 hundred and something.
It buries the Wii U in ports and remasters alone.
You'd have to be extremely reductive to put the Wii U on top in any way.
Relatively current and half assed AAA Western ports at Wii U's launch? Okay.
It's behind in every other category by a significant margin.
I was looking at old data my bad.Switch has close to 7000 games IIRC. Nintendo's own slides mentioned that.
Well over 4000.