Peter Wanat, Big Time Games producer and developer behind such titles as Scarface, Chronicles Of Riddick and the upcoming 360/PS3/PC game Wanted: Weapons Of Fate, pulled no punches against the state of third-party development on Nintendo's Wii console during an episode of Gametrailers.com's Invisible Walls segment.
You can view the episode in all its profane glory below:
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Wanat praises the "overwhelming success" of Nintendo's console and credits them with releasing "awesome" first party titles, but denigrates the third-party Wii library as having "crappy graphics and basic control play" that caters towards towards "little kids and old people", creating a market that developers "shouldn't have to get down on (their) knees and blow Nintendo for".
He praises the porting mechanisms of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, which allow for parity between assets and code for each platform, but describes the Wii as a "f*****g (Sega) Genesis" in comparison and the typical development cycle for a Wii project as "less than a PS2 game". According to Wanat, any developer spending more than $500,000 developing a game for the Wii is unlikely to turn a profit due to the inability to share assets with ports to platforms such as the 360 and PC, going on to cite Sega's Wii-exclusive MadWorld as a game that would need to sell "2-3 million copies" to turn be considered a worthwhile investment.
At this point in time bashing the Wii's meagre third-party library has become somewhat of a cliche within the gaming community, but it's not often that a prominent developer speaks so candidly about the situation. We all know it, Nintendo executives have acknowledged it and the recent sales figures for a certain prominent third-party title seem to confirm it, so why is it such a taboo subject within the industry? Well, the industry outside of Wanat, of course, but it's hard to take a man who doesn't recognise the power of blast processing seriously, even if the numbers do back him up.
[source gametrailers.com]
Comments (7)
This guy shows just how dumb he is by dissing the Genesis/Mega Drive. Sega's machine outclassed its rival the SNES in many ways; find me a shooter on the SNES that is anywhere near as good as Thunder Force IV and I'll eat my hat.
Plus, are we supposed to be amazed by his track record? Scarface? Erm, no thanks.
Haha Damo your too defensive, I don't think he was saying that
I think he has the right idea, but doesn't know how to get his point across without sounding like an ass. Oh and Axelay Damo. Here's your hat.
LOL don't diss teh Mega Drive man!
Axelay, Turrican, and....cough Space Invaders cough Kiddin!
Look, the Mega Drive/Genesis lost that Console War! End of story. Get over it! Move on with your life. Blast processing was just a word they made up to sell more consoles. I know that's like telling you that Santa isn't real... but as it turned out, Nintendo did what Gene-didn't.
Anyway let's go into the present now. I agree that the 3rd party support for the Wii has been poor and sometimes vomit-inducing. (True story) Speaking of parties, count how many 3rd party Wii titles include the word "party" in them. So I agree with this guy's central message, but he could've used a better means of telling it.
Space Invaders The Original game on SNES really is amazing. To think I imported a game for the Playstation from Japan that could run on that 16-bit dinosaur...well, it's incredible what Nintendo achieved back then.
I think Wanat's central point is good if the intent of 3rd party devs is to release the same game on all platforms: clearly that would be a mistake depending on the title -- I thought Marvel Ultimate Alliance turned out pretty well and stacks up against the other systems visually to boot -- so the question is: how much to spend on development for Wii titles and who is your target market? Really I think a budget of US$500,000 for any game is a bit daft, but I suspect we'll be seeing fewer multi-million-dollar releases in the near future...
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