Damn, I need a Wii U

I try not to watch too much trailers and info because I already know that I' ll buy it. I' ve heard the same concerns from other people, but although I do hope there' s more to that game than a RE4 alt skin I' ll take what I can get.

 

Factually incorrect. You remember games from Capcom, and Konami, but just because they were big names means squat. The Genesis had far more third party support than the SNES. EA used the hell out of the Genesis and the third party support for the Genesis was one of its biggest marketing points. The SNES had a lot of Japanese third party support, but the Genesis had the lion's share of Western developers. Hence why I said it decreased- before the NES held the monopoly on third parties, while, in the fourth generation of consoles, the Genesis gained overwhelming third party support so they didn't have to directly compete with Nintendo.

The point here is you're arguing a battle of history with me, and I can provide countless links, videos, and magazine scans to prove that history shows the Genesis was the third party machine due to western developers getting comfy. I can assure you without resorting to all of that that you're wrong and your idolization of the SNES, old Square, Castlevania, and so on and so forth is the only thing getting in the way.

 

From what I' m told in the US the Genesis was the cool kids console and had the lion' s share of the market while the Snes was for the sissy boys or something. It wasn' t the case in my country (nor I think in Europe as a whole), they were evenly split and so were the Master System and the Nes before that. Western or not (and I think by western you mean American), the Snes had plenty of third party support, a point that you don' t seem to deny. Plenty enough that the average number of non Nintendo games released on it every month remained fairly constant up until the PS came around. Can' t say the N64 had nearly as much support, it was hard not to notice the sudden change of pace in that regard.

My other point was that the lack of third party support some Nintendo consoles suffered from had little to do with the fear of competing with Nintendo alone (as opposed to competing with pretty much everyone else, or worse, with Nintendo and everyone else on the GBs and DSs) and everything to do with the market being much less evenly split between Nintendo and the others. And/or their peculiar technological choices (don' t underestimate laziness).

 

Uhhh no. The SNES destroyed the Genesis in America, taking 55%-65% of the market at a given time.

Europe is where the Mega Drive and Master System both did the best.

By Western, I mean west of the international date line. However, that can skew things because of where it falls. It's basically European and North American in the gaming community. The germanic languages and such. Eastern basically means "Asian".

Yes, but what you're missing is that there was a major, major decline. The NES had a monopoly on third-party support and the Master System didn't get much at all. The Genesis came out, started selling well, and so a lot of publishers flew the Nintendo coop because they couldn't compete against Nintendo games. The short story version of this is after the game crash, Nintendo revived console gaming, but almost every major selling game on the console was from Nintendo themselves. Other games couldn't compete with their marketing and universal appeal. Games were much more expensive then and and third parties had already crushed consumer trust, but Nintendo got it back through Mario. There's reason seven out of ten NES games you always hear about were from Nintendo themselves.

That's the point I'm making. It was a continual degrade until third party support didn't exist. The SNES is where the decline of support started and with later gens came an increased popularity of western games, who either came from a company with bad Nintendo relations or didn't seek to make Nintendo relations. At least Capcom and Konami tried to play both sides back on the N64.

Here's the thing, third parties aren't idiots. They know as well as we do why people buy Nintendo consoles- to buy Nintendo games. This has been the case since the NES. This will not change. That said, the GBA and DS and 3DS show times where there was no other choice. The market for the PSP and Vita were too small and prior to that no competition existed other than way back with the Game Gear, and that had the same problem. If you wanted to make a cheaper game, you had no choice but to go with Nintendo. This is why people comply with Nintendo still using carts for their handhelds. The only time hardware came into effect when talking third parties and Nintendo is the PS1 era, but they flew the coop for many other reasons than hardware, as we've just talked about. The GC was an easy platform to port to, which is why Ubisoft put almost all of their games on all three consoles. It was also capable of running games pushing the Xbox's specs, so the only trouble maker then was the PS2 and that got the MOST third-party support due to good relationships with Sony and it was cheaper to make games for. Point being, people would rather compete against Nintendo in a market where they're going to get noticed and even spotlighted than compete directly with Nintendo and trying to feed off their leftover scraps.