Wii Game Devs Testing Waters With Less-Casual Games

MTV's Multiplayer Blog has a pair of interviews with Wii game developers about how they're struggling to reach a more hardcore gaming audience. Jordan Itkowitz, lead designer for Deadly Creatures, wants to stay away from designing a typical collection of mini-games, saying, "The trick is to get those new players to step outside that easy comfort zone and try some genres and experiences that, while accessible and familiar to gamers, are still a bit foreign to anyone who's new to the culture." Dan Borth of Red Fly Studio is skeptical of the viability of hardcore games without relying on Nintendo and other major companies to "put a valiant effort in properly supporting developers to create great games."

Comments

Re:slashdot != news for nerds or stuff that matter

[meringuoid]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+digg

You see that? Even sites where one can post random bullshit have become more popular than this fucking place...

I'll go one further:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+digg%2C+4chan

You underestimate the popularity of random bullshit. It attracts vast numbers of people. Of course few of them have anything worthwhile to say desu desu desu desu desu. I can has cheezburger?

It's really quite simple

[Kjella]

The Wii has sold 46 million consoles. How many of those do you need to sell to in order to make a profitable "hardcore" game? Not that many...

Re:They'll sell

[Quiet_Desperation]

From what I have seen all first person shooters have a shooting ridicule

What, like some NPC that follows you around and rags on you when you miss?

Re:They'll sell

[TemporalBeing]

If Nintendo wanted the Wii to really take off

Except the Wii is ALREADY the most successful platform in this generation if not in all previous generations. It's only competitor is PS2 for sales counts, and its already crushing that for where the PS2 was at the same life point.

Face it, the Wii already took off as it is with the strategy Nintendo is already using. Why would they change it?

Great games marry a well known genre with great stories, challenge curves, artwork, plot, and so on; all of which takes time, iterative design, and lots of competition.

For hard core gamers, true. For everyone else, not so much. Most people care about being able to (a) have a little bit of fun, and (b) being able to play the game. For example - I love racing games, but a lot of the hard core games are just so unplayable that it makes them worthless to me unless I devote hundreds of hours learning how to play the game, which I have not desire (nor time) to do. Hard core games may love that, but the other 99% of us don't.

Wii fit and Wii sports are nice technology demonstrators (just like Quake 3 was a great engine demonstrator on the PC), but not fantastic games.

WiiSport and WiiFit are probably among the most played on the console among any age group. They'll likely go down as a the number one titles for this generation of consoles (if not for all generations up to it) as well if they keep up as they do. Don't forget, they're also used in a lot of places that would never have seen a console otherwise (e.g. nursing homes, rehab centers, etc).

Wii games have not matured into proper genres yet

I'll somewhat agree here - but even then, there are a lot of different genres on the Wii, and some likely some new genres that don't exist any where else. But that's more due to the new technology Nintendo put out than it is for the system as a gaming console.