Wii market damaged by "sub-standard software"

December 1st, 2009, 15:39 Posted By: wraggster

Lightning Fish Games CEO Simon Prytherch has told GamesIndustry.biz that he believes the Wii market's issues this year have partly been the result of poor quality games that flooded the market, leaving consumers who had bad experiences to spend money only on the key franchises.

"I don't think you can ever write Nintendo off, but the Wii market - from a third party software developer and publisher perspective - is over-saturated with product," he explained. "Consumers have been damaged by a lot of sub-standard software, so now they only trust big Nintendo brands.

"So going forward we're moving onto other platforms, and we always have been over the course of the company. But in this coming year we're definitely going to be doing PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles," he added.

While the company's first release - Ubisoft-published NewU for the Wii - may have suffered in that market, he does see a strong future for motion-based games in 2010, with the new hardware from Microsoft and Sony being released... but only as long as the right games are developed.

"The short answer is that they'll have a huge impact," he said. "The longer answer is that they'll only have a huge impact once people start designing specifically for those controllers. The first-person shooters and driving games - they've already got a really good controller that people are really happy with as a hardcore audience.

"There will be totally new genres that will be developed for those controllers, and it would be foolish of me to try and predict what they'll be - but I'd say they do involve a lot more characterisation and story, and a lot more social interaction.

"If you're talking about something like Natal, where you're using your whole body to control something as opposed to just your thumbs, then it's a whole different way of looking at things. You've got to look at people's fatigue levels, and not keep them jumping around for hours on end... you need to give them rest periods."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ndard-software

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