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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

There's another view to this, though.

Starting with the Wii Nintendo has significantly loosened their requirements for publishing games on their platforms. The Wii SDK is much cheaper (almost an order of magnitude) than either the Xbox or PS3 dev kits, the from what I can tell approval processes are far less onerous.

What has resulted? A deluge of crap. The amount of cheap shovelware games for the Wii boggles the mind, and dilutes the Wii brand significantly. It gets so bad that even non-gamer grandmas have noticed.

In comparison, Sony and MS are riding high, they have a gigantic amount of 3rd party support, people are willing to pay their ticket price for entry to the platform, and willing to put up with a lot more content restrictions (e.g., no free DLC, extensive multiplay/connectivity requirements even for singleplayer games)

There's a fine line to be walked here, and I'm not sure if Android has the model right either.

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True, there's a lot of crapware, but look at the sales results. Wii is the top console, by a large margin. Nintendo is absolutely beating the stuffing out of both MS and Sony on profits.

Look at the game sales charts on The Magic Box. NDS and Wii games dominate the top 20, and have been doing so for years. There's simply no comparison.

It's really hard to make the argument that Nintendo's screwing up here. If anything, facts seem to support the argument that loose licensing requirements leads to dominance.

Only Nintendo's Wii games are prospering, third parties are having trouble making money on the Wii.

Isn't this good though? If the problem is the 'deluge of shovel-ware' then having all of these third parties not being unable to turn a respectable profit with them is good news. It's capitalism at work, right? You make no money on crappy games so you stop making crappy games.

Though, I suspect they do actually make money on the Wii. The sheer number of crappy games coming out for the Wii would indicate that the 'market' believes these crappy games will sell enough to get a decent ROI.

This leaves one of two possibilities:

A) You made up your previous fact.

B) These third parties are all to dumb to realize that making these games isn't making them any money.

I'm betting on A.

There is another possibility:

C) The profitability of these games are reliant on a unsustainable pattern, or by itself contributes negatively to sustained profit. Say you were a knockoff manufacturer for expensive watches, and you were for some reason able to get your goods into the official distribution channel for real watches - this is an extremely profitable situation for you. Then everyone figures out how you're making money hand over fist and starts doing it too, and soon consumer confidence in the quality of the watches drops through the floor, and nobody (real or knockoff) makes any money. This is a very real possibility Nintendo faces. The profitability of shovelware relies on consumer confidence of products in the channel in general, and the market has a definite carrying capacity for shit games - exceeding this risks the viability of the platform entirely.

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