Topic: Publishers Wouldn't Give n-Space's Winter a Chance

[Ian Sane]

The success of RE4, a port mind you, should be enough proof for any investor.

Wrong lesson.  Publishers are lazy.  To them RE4's success doesn't mean there's a market for mature core games but rather a market for last gen ports.  Hell Nintendo themselves are all over that trend and kind of started it with Twilight Princess.

[Stogi]

I actually think they got the lesson but dismissed it. Money isn't readily available anymore. If your going to invest and you don't care about the "potential" market; you only care about the proven market. "But that's Resident Evil" is actually a wise response.

But that said, the bigger the risk, the bigger the win.

[AV]

i would bet most of the people who bought RE4 already had the GAMECUBE version, or knew of it, but decided to use purchase power as a way to vote for type of games. They did it again with Umbrella Chronicles.

people buying games not ONLY to play them, but as a way to influence future games.


doesn't that count for something

[Stogi]

I find it much easier to boycott games rather than waste money on decent ones...

[Mario]

Only a complete idiot would buy RE4 twice, and Umbrella Chronicles is a good game.

You can't blame Nintendo for staying away from this after the complete DISASTER that was Disaster: Day of Crisis. It's one of the best games of all time, and nobody bought it. NOBODY. Press ignored it, gamers ignored it. What's the point? Nintendo doesn't care about the 3 gamers sitting at home crying about the state of the industry who actually know what a good game is. It's not a market. There is NO market for good videogames, plain fact. A game needs MUCH more going for it than quality.

[Stogi]

Did Disaster come to the US?

[Kairon]

The more Mario advocates Disaster, the more I want to import.

[King of Twitch]

i would bet most of the people who bought RE4 already had the GAMECUBE version, or knew of it, but decided to use purchase power as a way to vote for type of games.

doesn't that count for something

[KDR_11k]

These publishers need to fire their marketing departments because the idiots seem to have no problem with okaying a 100 million dollar big name brand game for a developer with a spotty track record (read: real chance of the game turning out to suck and wasting all that investment). Even if they're fairly sure that Winter wouldn't have much market appeal (which wouldn't surprise me, gamers get excited over pre-release nformation easily but buying the result is completely different and Geist wasn't exactly a big seller) they're still failing to make any ground on the Wii while throwing massive risks at the HD consoles.

I think there can be other reasons why Nintendo isn't picking this up: If they did it would be considered a Nintendo game by third parties and sales would prove nothing, Nintendo is pretty much laying low so third parties could accumulate sales and establish a foothold to expand upon but no, they just sit back and waste the opportunity (maybe that's the reason Sega got The Conduit, Nintendo might have wanted to let others take stabs at high profile games like that). Also Nintendo might not want to pick up every random orphaned project, there's bound to be tons of devs shopping around and maybe Nintendo already grabbed what they consider better ones (they did after all take titles like Disaster, Sin & Punishment and Dynamic Slash, I'm not counting Punch Out because that's more like outsourcing). Maybe Nintendo doesn't want to become known as the garbage collector for devs.

[Ian Sane]

I think there can be other reasons why Nintendo isn't picking this up: If they did it would be considered a Nintendo game by third parties and sales would prove nothing, Nintendo is pretty much laying low so third parties could accumulate sales and establish a foothold to expand upon but no, they just sit back and waste the opportunity (maybe that's the reason Sega got The Conduit, Nintendo might have wanted to let others take stabs at high profile games like that). Also Nintendo might not want to pick up every random orphaned project, there's bound to be tons of devs shopping around and maybe Nintendo already grabbed what they consider better ones (they did after all take titles like Disaster, Sin & Punishment and Dynamic Slash, I'm not counting Punch Out because that's more like outsourcing). Maybe Nintendo doesn't want to become known as the garbage collector for devs.

Or it could just be that Nintendo wasn't pleased with how Geist turned out and thus doesn't want to fund another project by N-Space.

[vudu]

Only a complete idiot would buy RE4 twice, and Umbrella Chronicles is a good game.

Count me among the idiots.

I have no regrets.

[Plugabugz]

Or it could just be that Nintendo wasn't pleased with how Geist turned out and thus doesn't want to fund another project by N-Space.

That's Nintendo's fault for it coming out how it did. Nintendo have all the talent of their other dev's to help N-Space out (Brawl got to borrow people from Monolith) but chose not to . In contractural terms nintendo was the customer (the end prodyuct being Geist) and they could have easily have made significant changes or inject support from elsewhere.

[NWR_pap64]

Slightly off topic, but I realize that Winter's problem is not exclusive to the Wii.

Sean Malstrom once said that the problem with publishers is that they don't see consumers, they see demographics. They see what they are buying and instead of wondering WHY they are buying them they just rush to make games like that.

For example, they look at the XBOX 360 fanbase and see that Halo 3 and Gears of Wear sell incredibly well. They rush out to get these games made and create a flooded market.

This is why when developers pitch unconventional ideas publishers say "it doesn't have a chance" or "there's no demographic for it" because they are only interested in ideas that fit in with the demographics. And like its been said already in this thread, its a bad thing.

Its bad because none of the consoles and handhelds can't have unique and varied titles. The Wii gets stuck with would be party titles while the 360 and PS3 gets nothing but Halo wannabes.

So Winter's problem is something that can affect all gamers, all publishers and all developers, regardless of the console they support.

[Kairon]

Slightly off topic, but I realize that Winter's problem is not exclusive to the Wii.

Sean Malstrom once said that the problem with publishers is that they don't see consumers, they see demographics. They see what they are buying and instead of wondering WHY they are buying them they just rush to make games like that.

For example, they look at the XBOX 360 fanbase and see that Halo 3 and Gears of Wear sell incredibly well. They rush out to get these games made and create a flooded market.

This is why when developers pitch unconventional ideas publishers say "it doesn't have a chance" or "there's no demographic for it" because they are only interested in ideas that fit in with the demographics. And like its been said already in this thread, its a bad thing.

Its bad because none of the consoles and handhelds can't have unique and varied titles. The Wii gets stuck with would be party titles while the 360 and PS3 gets nothing but Halo wannabes.

So Winter's problem is something that can affect all gamers, all publishers and all developers, regardless of the console they support.

I think these are very good points pap64. We often criticize the XBox 360 and PS3 for their bald-space-marine fetish, but we don't take notice of the difficulties of titles that are not bald-space-marine-based, like Banjo, Viva Pinata, etc.