From gamespot, and THQ. Very encouraging, as low dev costs and possible good sales is a winning combo. By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot Posted May 5, 2006 3:26 pm PT 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. "We showed in a press event recently a SpongeBob game using the Nintendo Wii and Wii controller," Farrell said, "and standing there watching very jaded game journalists hoot and holler on a SpongeBob game was actually quite relieving. One of the things we like about that platform is the development costs...on the Wii are nowhere near what they are on the PS3 and Xbox 360. That's something that's quite encouraging. As you probably know, our portfolio maps very, very well to what we think the Wii demographic is going to be." Farrell also talked about developing for the Wii as opposed to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, noting that it was far less expensive making games for Nintendo's console. Farrell prefaced his comments by noting that he wasn't "a development professional," but he said the development environment for the Wii was similar to the GameCube's. "[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."
Here to hoping all of the current gamecube devkits can be used for Wii development by just optaining one licensed Wii devkit.. (so more people can work on weaker working hardware and use one devkit for actual testing purposes etc) That could expand the resources of independant groups. And here's to hoping that I'll pass the cavity test.
The Gamecube had lots of these Wii advantages (ie: Low price, easy to develop for, etc) from the outset, and despite all the excitement, never really panned out as well as people had thought. I think people are a bit too excited, maybe excessively so, about the Wii right now.
Good point on the Gamecube note. As for the Wii though, well, a lot of people did laugh at Nintendo when they announced the DS, and Nintendo quickly made 99% of those naysayers eat their words(well, maybe not so quickly, as I do recall that initial... oh so painful, drought of games). I imagine most people are expecting the "console version" of the DS this time around. Hell, I know I am.:love:
True, but from what I hear the wii takes this to a greater extent. The problem with the cube was getting it into peoples houses in the first place - the wii has the trojan horse advantage of the virtual console and the controller which should help get it into houses in the first place
Oh, come on, let's face it: the GameCube IS a failure. A little more than 10 million consoles sold... that's a shame. It had everything to be great, however. Of course it has had far more games on its library than the N64, but the N64 sold almost 33 million consoles. Anyway, I still prefer the N64, I never liked the GameCube anyway. But the Wii looks great for me. It would be my pick if I could afford one next gen console. Maybe if it is priced around $200 I'd considering getting one.
Funny, I seem to remember hearing around 15-20 million gamecube sales. Either way it is less successful than the N64, whether its a failure is debatable - I believe it made money, which at the end of the day counts as success to me. Anywhom, back on topic I wasn't denying that the gamecube wasn't as successful as could be possible, but that nintendo have hopefully addressed that with the wii by taking what the cube did, and doing it even moreso.
The main problem with GC was the aproach: ninty wanted to compete in the same league that MS and Sony (hell GC is way more powerful that PS2) and that's why it failed. Wii goes the other way around. In the CPU/GPU aspect is like if panasonic launched the M2 to compete against PS2, the differences are just abysmal. But the controller and online support is what makes it interesting. About the whole licenses/cavity search thing, do you guys think it would be that hard to get an indie license to develop in Wii? or would it be easier than in X360/Live arcade?
as far as making money goes GC would be a huge success and Xbox would be a failure of N-Gage or Gizmodo proportions... didnt MS loose something collosal like 2billion dollars on Xbox?
