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Wii U / Nintendo general news and discussion
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
So we all agree that marketing has been the WiiU's downfall. Taking it back a bit, why did the GameCube sell less than anticipated? I wouldn't have considered myself a gamer back then so my knowledge is hazy at best. I'm curious to know what Nintendo could have learned from that generation and brought with them to their subsequent consoles.
What murphyebass said.
Playstation had become the only player in the 32bit race pretty much and was as synonymous with gaming as Nintendo and Atari were in their heyday.
The ps2 was already a year established by the time the GameCube came out and by then it's rubbish software line up was bolstered by the likes of gt3 DMC and the surprise hit gta3. It arrived after the Xbox as well which had Halo.
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
Radiosonde wrote: »It's a waste of the hardware if the that's all or most of what the console boasts, which may end up being the case on the Wii U, if Nintendo decides to rely on cheaper, faster to produce games. And Nintendo haven't made a "joyous" 2D mario plaformer since the SNES's heyday.
Got to disagree. 3d world and the 2 galaxy games are the best examples of 3d platformers there are and nsmb wii and u are up there with world and mario 3 in terms of quality. The console nsmb games don't get the love they deserve.
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
They haven't been playing catch up just making stupid mistakes. The delay of the GameCube was a big factor but with the n64 they gave Sony nearly 2 years head start. By the time it came out Sony owned the market and had bought off third party devs by offering rock bottom licensing deals and control of units manufactured. Nintendo was slow to react and still offered third parties the same terms for licensing; a much higher license fee and capital down to by cartridge stock controlled by Nintendo.
Videogames are a business, there's no grudges. Nintendo had fixed their licensing agreements with the cube but launching late their sales suffered and third parties left when the investment to port to the system wasn't worth it.
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
Thought the wii was a great machine. I don't get the whole shovelware argument either. It had a lot of shovelware but its not like you couldn't ignore it and had to buy it. The PS2 had far more but that complaint isn't thrown against it. The main problem with. The wii again was third parties. It had great support until they realised the audience on it wasn't interested in buying games and abandoned it.
Nintendo really need to win the third parties back because as it stands this will be there fourth console that mainly Nintendo has ad to support all by itself with software. The next console has to be graphically comparable and easy to port to. Then again maybe Nintendo are going for another disruptive device like the wii and don't want to compete in the home market.
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
Well with regards to the GTA3 thing what I remember was that there was very little hype about the game at all with previews being quite dismissive of it in that it got very little space in magazines. GTA was a success but that had died off a bit by the time of GTA3's release. It wasnt until reviews came out that people took notice. It was looking like a very average game at the time with dreadful graphics and it wasn't until people actually played the final game that they realised just what it was and people went bananas for it. Once the reviews hit then GTA mania took hold.
Before then it kind of felt like on of those B-tier 'take it or leave it' type of games. It also promised a lot but then a lot of games did at the time and failed to deliver. It was when people realised it actually had delivered on it's promises that it got exciting.
For me at the time it felt like God of War. Lukewarm previews and people ignoring it until the reviews came out and surprised everyone.I'd hardly say that Sony "bought off third party devs". They incentivized development on their machine by offering developers better conditions than Nintendo and a bigger cut of the pie. Hardly buying them off, just good business by treating your development partners well.
That's what I was trying to say but worded it badly
Incentivized as you use is a much better word for it.
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Retr0gamer wrote: »Well with regards to the GTA3 thing what I remember was that there was very little hype about the game at all with previews being quite dismissive of it in that it got very little space in magazines. GTA was a success but that had died off a bit by the time of GTA3's release. It wasnt until reviews came out that people took notice. It was looking like a very average game at the time with dreadful graphics and it wasn't until people actually played the final game that they realised just what it was and people went bananas for it. Once the reviews hit then GTA mania took hold.
Before then it kind of felt like on of those B-tier 'take it or leave it' type of games. It also promised a lot but then a lot of games did at the time and failed to deliver. It was when people realised it actually had delivered on it's promises that it got exciting.
For me at the time it felt like God of War. Lukewarm previews and people ignoring it until the reviews came out and surprised everyone.
That's what I was trying to say but worded it badly Incentivized as you use is a much better word for it.
That's honestly really interesting to me. I honestly don't know if I blanked it out or if I just read the most biased magazines. Again I was a fan of all the others and the internet wasn't exactly as prevalent back then so I couldn't really tell if it was hyped but I remember really looking forward to it.
Funny now.. as while I still play and enjoy them. I'm not a huge fan of GTA anymore.
Same with God of War.. I remember looking forward to that game and enjoying the demo but I did only rent it.0 -
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Join Date:Posts: 50599
GTA III was not a surprise hit. Look at the production values. DMA / Rockstar were expecting a hit. You don't put that kind of voice talent and licensed music (not to mention the actual game engine itself of course) into a game you think will break even or lose money. It's not worth it. They knew what they had (or rather what they needed to make the consuming public think they had for opening week). And the pre-release hype was, if memory serves, mental. Everyone I knew was going crazy for it, and most of us didn't own Playstations, had to wait for the PC version. Expectation was huge from the moment they said they were going to make GTA in 3D, it got tonnes of coverage in gaming media. MAybe it depended what you were reading. At the time I was reading online when I should have been working harder, and there seemed to be plenty of excitement. Subjective opinion of course...
GTA3 had quite a modest budget actually. DMA weren't a big company at the time. Rockstar were a tiny publisher as well with no real big hits under their belt and a hell of a lot of dross. They only hit it big with GTA3 and Max Payne (just look at their published games list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Take-Two_Interactive_video_games) They only licensed some unknown artists and the scarface soundtrack. Videogame voice acting was dirt cheap at the time, the actors in it weren't exactly big names and were doing work between gigs. Then there's the fact that PS2 games didn't cost all that much to make. They probably would have broke even at 150-200k sales.
There actually wasn't all that much hype about the game before it came out. I even read an article (I think from Jaz Rignall) saying that Rockstar specifically told them to down play the violence in case there was backlash from the press. The Hype machine only kicked in once the game was ready for review and the team realised they had something big on their hands that needed pushing. I don't know where all the glowing previews are from that you are talking about. Reviews were glowing but previews were quite tepid, here's a few examples:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/p_gta3
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/hands-on-grand-theft-auto-3/1100-2809575/
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2001-hands-on-grand-theft-auto-3/1100-2762402/
http://ie.ign.com/articles/2001/05/18/e3-2001-grand-theft-auto-3-impressions
Contrast that to when IGN got exclusive hands on with near finished code. IGN were the only ones with an exclusive at the time so other publications weren't raving bout it until September, a month before release. That's when the hype machine kicked into gear.
http://ie.ign.com/articles/2001/08/27/exclusive-screens-and-impressions-of-grand-theft-auto-iii
It kind of just sounds like revisionist history to me that people talk about how hyped everyone was for it. MGS2 was the game people were excited for, not a ropey looking driving game that was the next iteration of a franchise that was moderately popular.
As for Edge raving about GTA 3:
http://www.edge-online.com/review/grand-theft-auto-3-review/
It's 8/10 but they gave it 6/10 at the time and changed it due to backlash (which of course they won't admit to being edge and all).
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Moderators, Category Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 34,605 CMod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 33828
I remember their main issue was with the poor on foot combat, something that wasn't fixed for some time, not until the PC version anyway and I don't think the consoles had satisfactory on foot combat until GTAV.
And the 6/10 was a misprint, as evidenced by the actual review.
Dearest Retro, we're never going to let this go, are we?
Gunstar Heroes 6/10!
And here's their admission of getting it wrongWhat we got wrong: Labelling Gunstar as shallow is to miss the point – this bullet-fest is pure and lean, free of the bloat of unnecessary collectables and asides. You may not play it several times back to back, but its satisfying gunplay continues to draw us back in two decades after release. The co-op was far more engaging than suggested, too, often seeing the cart resuscitated for just one more try.
And as for GTA3,
Here's the retraction and revision of their original 8/10 review, the one you said they wouldn't do as they are Edge, or something....What we said: "The considered and burgeoning topography of Liberty City feels both intricate and robust. It’s a place that sprawls but doesn’t bustle, and the sparse ambient effects which accompany your on-foot travails are testament to this…The one jarring flaw is the spurious nature of up-close combat – it’s an awkward system that stymies play during hectic hails of gangland warfare, and is doubly infuriating at the end of a protracted campaign." [8]
What we got wrong: If the measure of an Edge 10 is its impact on the industry, then the above score is two points off the mark. Developers today still talk excitedly about creating “living, breathing” worlds – and GTAIII offered the first. Its city was a sandbox, ripe and ready for players to tear through, and it accommodated players' destructive whims rather than attempting to corral them.
What we got right: The combat really was terrible. It wasn’t until GTAIV that Rockstar finally got gunplay right, the combination of the Euphoria engine’s procedural animation and a much-needed cover mechanic adding both emergence and structure to more violent encounters. And Liberty City could definitely feel sparse – this didn’t really matter at the time, however, as players hadn’t seen anything like it.0 -
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