Okay, Reggie, so why is BioShock 2 NOT on the Wii?  You're the market leader!  Why is this great game not on your console?

Who I really want to hear from is NCL.  They make the decisions and I have a feeling they don't really care about this.  It's usually NOA, who pretty much has no power at all, talking about third party support.  This has been an issue for years and Nintendo always talks about it but they never really seem to demonstrate that they truly care and are doing anything about it.  When you're the market leader how do have the worst third party support?  If you really cared and really were trying to fix the problem would it still persist as much as it does?  I find it impossible to have faith in them regarding this matter.

That's a question for Take Two.

But Reggie was on his way to go talk to Take2 about supporting the Wii back in 2006, it's funny how he never made it there when asked again in 2008.
Has he made it there yet? That may be why we don't have BioShock 2.

3rd Parties are the companies that are supposed to approach platform makers.  THEY are the ones without a game machine of their own to put games on.

If that's not the case, then the Industry is (was) a money hat convention.

Don't try to change the subject. I wanna know why it took 2 years from the time Reggie was "spending some time later today with the folks over at Take-Two " to get to " the NoA president did admit that he had yet to have a conversation with Take Two".

that is selective quote grabbing, but I wanna know what happened? Did he get lost? Has he "spent some time" with them yet? these are the questions that need to be answered!! ;D

He found that bitch wasn't worth dealing with, and dropped her. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is not a bitch-nigga. They don't escort bitches, they fuck bitches. Ya feel me?

Then I'll make the selective inference that Take Two was supposed to meet with Reggie at that venue (since it seems press/others came to Nintendo for some event; the article doesn't provide a source for Reggie's comments), and never showed up.

Thank you.

Except that they have a game machine to put games on - the PS3 or Xbox 360.  Nintendo can't just sit there and hope that third parties come on board.  Right or wrong they've got to be pro-active about this issue because the competition is doing that.  I don't care if Sony or MS had to pull a few strings to get such-and-such game on their console.  All I give a damn about is that Nintendo doesn't have that game.  Nintendo isn't going to go broke by approaching third parties to support their console.  No one is asking them to fund games and get none of the revenue from them or anything like that.

Besides it is in Nintendo's best interest to have healthy third party support.  They get a cut from EVERY GAME SOLD and it just improves their library which encourages console sales and takes pressure from Nintendo to please their userbase on their own.  It fills in gaps in the release schedule and provides variety so that everyone can find something that want to play.  A healthy lineup of games keeps your customers happy which will encourage them to continue to support you.  There is no downside.  Even if a third party game cut into the sales of Nintendo game, Nintendo would still get revenue.

Let the 3rd Parties break their banks.  They're out to screw Nintendo (still).  Nintendo always carefully asks the question "why should we support them?"  How do you change 3rd Party habits without paying them off?

As a console maker Nintendo takes on some responsibility in the satisfaction of their customers.  It is largely their responsibility to ensure that their console has a large and varied library of quality games.  Because of their poor third party support they don't have this.  Now this isn't entirely something they have control over.  But they have to make an effort.

Now you'll probably mention that since the Wii is so successful and selling so well that this doesn't matter.  Obviously Nintendo is satisfying their customers.  Well they pushed me to buy a PS3 and purchase of their next console sure as hell won't be the no-brainer decision it would have been years ago.  Yeah, Nintendo can hang on to their legion of non-gamers who are too ignorant to care but there is a segment of the market that does care and they're just giving these customers to the competition.  Why put yourself in a situation where the competition could release one big game that creates a Wii Sports like frenzy and you're not only stuck without it but you're trying to keep people from jumping entirely on the strength of first party releases?  How is constantly missing out on good games anything other than punching holes in your own boat?

What advantage is there in having poor third party support?  I don't see one at all.  I see the Wii succeeding DESPITE this.

I'll say Nintendo has historically been supporting (if you can call this being proactive) a handful of 3rd Parties (can't assume Nintendo has infinite outreach/wooing resources to form partnerships with every major Japanese and Western developer) and Nintendo STILL gets shafted.  Somewhere, somehow, the efforts haven't been working, and don't seem worth it.  The values held by many developers also make them intent on excluding Nintendo in their ideas/projects.  It's as if their means of successfully competing with Nintendo is being enemies of the entire Nintendo brand.  But if they do provide games for Nintendo, it's just casualized garbage.

How's Nintendo supposed to work with these people?

Unfortunately, the most meaningful solution Nintendo's come up with so far is to outright publish works by independent 3rd Party developers, as indicated by recent 2009/2010 announcements.  If Nintendo's not paying up for it, the 3rd Parties don't want to be part of it.

But paying up for it is exactly what Sony & MS are already doing.
It's gotten to the point where they aren't just buying exclusives, but buying timed exclusives, or buying exclusive DLC. So many publishers have taken advantage of MS's generous payouts for titles, that they've been using the extra to fund PS3 development.

I personally want Nintendo to do more wooing of the 3rd parties for support, but the last thing I would want them to do is get on their knees like MS and start begging for it.

Maybe the ideal situation is to have One And Only One Master First Party Publisher (Nintendo), hovering over all developers.  Don't court everyone, BUY everyone.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

WiiWare can lead to bigger and better things, like the SkyNet (SkyWorld?) of video games.

Can you elaborate on that because it's an interesting point?  Are you saying that Nintendo's success is a threat to them making the games they want to make so they treat Nintendo as an enemy?

Some days I can convince myself that third parties have some vendetta here but I can't longterm.  It just doesn't make sense because it's not good business.  Some companies may let bizarre grudges and personal feelings get in the way of good business, but with the Wii it ain't some third parties.  It's like EVERY third party that is even remotely worth a damn is treating it like garbage.  ALL of these companies consider themselves enemies of Nintendo?  That's just too conspiracy theory.

I think that Nintendo offering hardware that's too different from the other consoles, mixed with Nintendo's complete lack of effort to give anyone a reason to care, is a more likely reason.  You can't just include the Wii in most multiplatform games and Nintendo doesn't provide any incentives to make a Wii exclusive while Sony and MS do.  Nintendo probably just has no rapport with the devs that matter and makes no effort to.

They've also gone out of their way to market the Wii as casual-focused grandma console, and third parties are unsure if their games that don't target this market (ie: their GOOD games) will find an audience on the Wii.  We argue this is a misconception but I don't see Nintendo working to correct that.  If anything Nintendo almost exclusively toots the casual horn and just perpetuates the stereotype.  Nintendo acts like the "casual vs. core" situation doesn't even exist and that just makes them look casual-focused.

Why hello there time traveler from 2007, would you like a punt back to the past? :reggie:

Because the Wii can't handle it. I'm sorry, but it can't. As much fun as I have with with the games on the Wii, BioShock would have to be severely weakened to even run well on the little white box. Hell, the HD consoles don't even look that great running it.

Let's.

Bear in mind I try to maintain a distinction between publishers (administrators) and developers (laborers).  Developers are sources of new ideas and content while publishers are responsible for content delivery AND have the simple power to force the developer into producing "more" content within an existing framework/property (as opposed to working on brand new ideas/properties).

Publishers are about business.  There's a desire that's framed to make money, but usually not framed in a way to make customers; a quantity of existing customers are expected to exist, with an objective to continue extracting revenues from that same quantity of customers (at the root of it is the whole "demographic" nonsense).  The Pubs like to capitalize on trends, leading to licensed games, sequelitis, genre saturation, etc.  Sticking with what's popular is good business, as they understand.  Things go awry when there's a disconnect between their internal business, the content side, and the customers.  They weren't necessarily opposing Wii by dumping their garbage on the system, they're following trends, as usual.  And since their grasp of the content and customers was/is poor, the resource management and development of the titles are poor.  Pubs that might've been burned early on by "the casual failure" now have a stronger basis for making Nintendo an enemy.

The developers in question are extreme geeks/nerds.  They want their prided content presented via the latest & greatest toys.  One path to demonstrating their accomplishment is utilizing "cutting edge ____", usually graphics.  The Wii platform easily appeared as a threat partly due to its different value set, making the value in graphics/tech/etc seem much less relevant.  The popular hate-notion would be "all the attention Wii is getting means there's so many people that don't appreciate our special new gamer-game."  --But this isn't what I'm getting at.  Really, their ability to STAND OUT in the market is highly dependent on using the feature-heavy high-powered computators.  It's not just their prestige of making a fine craft, it's their BUSINESS that's dependent.  From this point, I see the developer's disconnect with the business side causing things to go awry.

For many, proportionally "increasing content (or recycling to like-new)" by "increasing tech" is their ONLY path to securing a place in the market (and thus we're also diseased with pay-DLC, joy).  This is a costly path to travel.  Wii, in all its cobweb tech glory, does away with this approach (their bloated game project can't achieve the performance nor the recognition they want), eliminating their only visible path to sustainability, making it an "easy" decision to exclude Wii in potential projects.  This is where I see begin to see the "bad business" (that, or it just proves they're not really talented game makers in the first place) coming from the developers as well as publishers.

Wii is a current, popular system, and has the undisputed largest audience, including a multi-million Mature Zelda/Smash Bros. audience; why skip it?  You want to have rich visuals, spending much more money on graphical asset production, endangering the financial stability of your hip new independent games studio, for a game that functions just like the ones that came out last generation?  Publishers, you don't have the courtesy to provide a "Wii version" at all (Wiimers supposedly don't care all that much about graphics anyway, right?  just like in Brown of Duty: Buttflex), even tho the dev costs are relatively cheap?  Here's what bothered me most:  there's all this game-making talent from last generation out there, and the last generation Wii hardware should already be familiar; why are the Wii efforts well below that of last generation's best (in basic function and performance)?

3rd Parties, how can you find an audience if you're not looking for it?  Where is your marketing?  Why must the audience have to "be there" in the first place?  Why aren't you taking the initiative to make your own and nurture it?  If you never did that, how the FUCK did you manage to develop yourselves as a gaming brand in the first place?

WHY, WE INVESTED IN A LOT OF BAD LICENSED GAMES AND HAD TO SHUT DOWN DEV STUDIOS HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW WE SAVED MONEY THAT TIME, DIDN'T WE

If they're not enemies they're a bunch of lazy snobs, unFit to participate in Wii's active lifestyle.

How about a Bioshock game built from the ground up for the wii and not a port of the current versions on the HD consoles?

Honestly, as a big Bioshock fan I have to say that I don't see much point in a new game in the series made just for Wii.  That ship has sailed with the release of the second game.  After 2 games, the franchise really doesn't have anywhere to go from here (although I'm sure 2K will beg to differ), at least as a Rapture-based game.  I suppose it could go back up into space (Rapture was originally going to be a space station before the developers changed their minds and made it an art deco city under the ocean), but it's really not Bioshock without Rapture.

As for Reggie, insert my usual comment about anything he says being completely pointless because in the grand scheme of things he doesn't matter, being an employee of NoA and not NCL.

Instead of a BioShock game why not just something from Irrational Games?  There are a lot of really talented developers who completely ignore the Wii.  Well, why not try to get them involved?  The devs are what matter.  I wonder sometimes that Nintendo completely misses the point and figures that since Soul Calibur, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Final Fantasy, etc are all on the Wii in some capacity that everything is peachy keen.  We know that the IP doesn't mean squat.  The talent that made those IP worth something in the first place is what is truly valuable.  Considering that last gen Nintendo thought that having their own dev work on a Metal Gear Solid remake while MGS3 was in development for a competing system suggests that Nintendo really does think the IP is what matters.

When I say that BioShock 2 should be on the Wii I mean the real BioShock 2, not some BioShock game.  And if the real BioShock 2 can't be ported because of the hardware difference (and I KNOW it can't) then we need some sort of equivalent.  The talent is what matters so let's get that talent on the Wii.  Why can't the best videogame talent in the world we working on the market leading Wii?  Aside from Nintendo themselves, the best in the biz are nowhere to be found.  That's what Nintendo should try for.  Asking 2K for something would just get us the same junk EA and Ubisoft give us.

For the quality games we're talking about, it takes a lot of money to make those games. That's a risk, and on Nintendo consoles, the games won't likely do as well to make up for it.

Why? It has to do with consumers' buying patterns. Look at MadWorld and other poorly selling third party efforts.

It started to happen in the 16-bit era and big time after that. Once developers saw they could sell better out from under the shadow of Nintendo's huge-selling software, they went to support those other platforms instead. With the PS3 and 360 promising big sales for big games, those developers don't need to do anything different.

When it comes to questions about the video game business, as with any business, the answer is almost always MONEY. That's true here, too.

2K would have to develop a whole new game in BioShock Wii. They've seen others like EA go down that road, and it hasn't struck them as a particularly profitable way to go.

No, they need to make the same Bioshock for the Wii, making a different Deadspace is what killed it on the Wii.

People always bring up MadWorld, but can anyone tell me what system that game would have been a success regardless of it it was HD or not? it's a horrible example to use in almost every comparison.

It is about the IP because that is where the brand recognition is. We could get another game from the same developers, but there is no guarantee that it would be a game that we know we would be interested in since the whole reason we even wanted a game from that dev in the first place, was because of the game they made for another platform that we didn't get and would have probably bought if it was provided.

Rockstar can make GTA9 of the HD systems, we can want GTA9 for the Wii, so Rockstar announces a Wii exclusive and produces Petty Larceny: Misdemeanor Crimes about a kid who likes to shoplift from stores. Could it be good? sure, but it isn't the GTA we wanted.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Ian: Bioshock has nowhere to go after Bioshock 2, as the last dregs of mystery about Rapture were thoroughly milked by Bioshock 2.  As for porting that game to Wii somehow, while the game is fairly standalone there are crucial hooks to its story you kind of need to play the original game to understand.  Now, what we can get on Wii is some sort of spiritual successor, much like Bioshock was the spiritual successor to System Shock 2.  So long as the same development team quality is maintained and the premise/execution are sound, that would work just as well if not better than getting an actual Bioshock game.  There's no reason the Wii couldn't get a built-from-the-ground-up FPS like that, save uncertainty that the Wii audience will actually appreciate and reward the effort.

From a business standpoint, though, there's no reason for 2K Games to even bother.  Bioshocks 1 and 2 were both very successful on the HD consoles, 2K Marin is perfectly happy working on the HD consoles, and Nintendo hasn't given any reason why 3rd parties should give a damn about giving them such a high-profile exclusive.

MadWorld is such a weak example.  It's a weird ass game.  It would not be this big runaway success on the other consoles.  Honestly I can't think of a third party release truly on par with something like BioShock (both critically and commercially successful) on the Wii.  Dragon Quest X will be the first absolute "this would be a hit on the other consoles" Wii exclusive.  Yeah, sometimes good games don't sell.  But there are good games that are also very unmarketable that will be destined for niche success.  Most of the good Wii third party games fit this mold.

But it wasn't just a different Dead Space.  It was a completely different game with completely different gameplay.  Nobody wants the Dead Space NAME on the box, we want the gameplay experience that PS360 owners got to have.  If it was Dead Space Wii and it was a third person surivival horror game, okay, now we've got something.  But it was an on-rails shooter.  What it was was EA wanting to get the Dead Space IP on the Wii in some form.  Same with all of these spin-offs.  They don't count because they're just a name on a box.  The gameplay we associate with those games is not offered.  Dead Space on the Wii didn't bomb because it was not the PS360 Dead Space.  It bombed because it played nothing like the PS360 Dead Space.  We don't know how well a unique Dead Space Wii would have sold because we didn't get one.

Though again I wonder what Nintendo's opinion of this is. Do they care or do they just see that something called "Dead Space" is on the Wii and think that's enough?  If I was in charge I would be quite upset that major third party releases were being released on every console BUT mine and I would be upset that third parties are dumping lame spin-offs "designed for the Wii audience" that just come across as a half-assed cash grab.  But then Nintendo likes their spin-offs to so they might not have the same perspective I do in this matter.  Nintendo themselves jerk the Wii userbase around with NPC titles and barely-sequels like Animal Crossing and is content to plunk their IP into any half-baked spin-off.  Nintendo does the same bad stuff, they just also do good stuff.  So while we see EA trying to con us into buying a Dead Space title that isn't really a Dead Space title, Nintendo might just see that as EA making good use of their IP.

Would we tolerate Link's Crossbow Training at all if we didn't also get a real Zelda?  It is pretty much the same type of lame spin-off that third parties give us.  If Nintendo was hypothetically a third party and released Twilight Princess on every console but the PS3 and then gave the PS3 Link's Crossbow Training instead would PS3 fans eat it up?  Probably not.

That is exactly what I was trying to say in as few words as possible.

Bioshock 2 on Wii would probably bomb, which is the problem. Take Two can't forecast the sales numbers to make it worthwhile. From 360 or PS3, bringing a game to Wii would require creating it almost from the ground up. It'd be like creating a new game as far as company resources go, so it's still an investment.

Worse, being a port, waggle controls would be non existent or tacked on, so the game, no matter what series, will always seem inferior to its HD cousin. For multi console owners, that means never buying the game for Wii and that further slashes the target audience. It's not profitable.

Franchises like Rockband, Guitar Hero, Madden, WWE Smackdown and Call of Duty show there's hope, but in every instance (a case could be made to exclude Madden), the games lack something from their HD counterparts. And the sales still reflect this.

But you get to add pointer controls which would vastly improving aiming in games like Bioshock, GTA, CoD and any other 1st & 3rd person game you can think of.

As for now it's a trade off of graphics for controls, and waggle does not need to be included to justify a Wii version.

We aren't asking for dumb down-ports, we're asking for Wii games!

It doesn't have to be a dumb downed port just because they brought it to the Wii. Look at Prince of Persia, the Wii version is basically the same game as the HD version only with unique features for the Wii.

With unique features it's not a dumb port.

I thought that with those two particular examples the sales were actually BETTER on wii..?

Yeah, you are completely WRONG and a basic search for sales would show this. As EasyCure said, the Wii versions of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games have actually been the BEST selling versions. Not to mention that the games themselves are the same on Wii as they are on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (minus being in HD).

Is there any chance that the big games of 2010 could turn the trend of wii third party games not selling very well around? I mean I see many third party games that I would love to have in my collection.

also, on on rails games, they take less effort to make, your perspective is forced, and because of this you won't see all the glitches you would normally see in a regular game, it clears out memory too because at any time you can only see what they want you to see.