Saltyk said:
Isn't this sort of thing exactly what happened with the Wii? It's third party support was pretty much nonexistent. We literally came to a point where someone said something was multiplatform and you automatically assumed they were talking PS3 and 360 only. Seems we're going that way with the Wii U.
And The N64... And the Gamecube... 3rd party support has been Nintendo's Achilles heel for a long time now...
And no matter how much the Nintendo Defense Force wants to claim otherwise, Nintendo needs third party support. The Wii managed success because it was new, unique and could be fun even to non gamers. Nintendo has failed in many ways with the Wii U. Not the least of which were naming and advertising. It's a bad sign when even a gamer like myself didn't know what the Wii U console looked like even a year after it's launch. I've never had that problem in the past.
Careful what you wish for though. Is 3rd party support important? Yes. But on the whole I think Nintendo damaged the Wii U more by trying to improve 3rd party support than if they had just gone on as usual.
The irony being, that Nintendo deliberately held back or delayed development of decent first party titles for the sake of 3rd party developers. (Go back to news from around the launch period.)
Look at the launch itself in fact; 20 titles. Most of which were 3rd party, and the few first-party titles were pretty weak by nintendo's standards... (Contrast this with the N64 where the ENTIRE launch lineup consisted of first-party titles.)
I get the feeling, that in trying to 'fix' third party support they actually shot themselves in the foot, and the Wii U would've performed better if Nintendo had stuck with it's older principles of releasing at least one strong first-party title at launch. (Let's face it, New Super Mario is not a very strong launch game for something involving mario...)
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Is Nintendo on it's last legs? No, I don't think so. But they seriously need to turn around the Wii U somehow (you can't rely on the 3DS exclusively). If things continue like this, they may have to look at some serious changes. And losing a rather high profile game like Watch Dogs, can't help, if this turns out to be true. The only thing worse than losing this would probably be losing X.
Of course, the Wii U seems like it could have really supported Watch Dogs easily since they were pushing the Smart Glass thing and the Wii U has that covered with the controller. Seems like they built the game with that in mind, actually.[/quote]
Anyway, to summarise, 3rd party support is indeed important, but Nintendo seems to have deliberately hamstrung themselves to try and fix it, making the Wii U less popular than it might've been with better first-party launch titles.
And while implementing policies to try and improve 3rd party support for your console is a good thing, it will clearly backfire spectacularly if you harm the console's overall success in the process.
Because at the end of the day, with 3rd party support, there is still one clear lesson; More popular console = more 3rd party support.
(That's of course not the whole truth - Especially in the days of multiplatform games. The Wii's 3rd party support was clearly hurt immensely by the weak hardware, which meant direct ports were difficult to do. So it had weak support in spite of having a clear numerical advantage over the other consoles.)
