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3rd party support- they say it is what makes or brakes a system. And for
the most part this appears to be true, practically any system you can bring
up that failed had poor support, and successful ones had plenty of it.
For example the Nintendo 64, Nintendo's current ill fated system. But it's
understandable why the N64 would be dieing now with the coming of the GameCube
right? Well not really if you think about it. There is no excuse why a
system should die off as fast as the Nintendo 64 did. A system should have
enough support to last at least for 3 months after the next systems launch,
but when you look at the Nintendo 64 now, it hardly has enough support
to make it to the GameCube's November launch. Only a few titles are still
on there way to the N64. Look at Playstation, almost a year after the release
of it's predecessor, the Playstation 2, it still has excellent support.
All because of superb 3rd party support. Which brings me to the topic
of my editorial, 3rd Party Support for the gameCube, and more or less,
Nintendo's feeling on 3rd party support. George Harrison, VP of Marketing
and corporate communications at NOA, recently said at E3 that "It's Ironic,
We've learned from our (past) challenges, and fixed things with GameCube"
Now this was made while discussing ease of development on the gameCube
compared to the Nintendo 64 in an effort to attract more 3rd party developers.
Especially the expensive cartridges from the Nintendo 64 and back days.
Now I found the quote from Harrison to be quite confusing when at Space
World 2001 I hear Nintendo say that they plan to supply nearly 80 percent
of the initial GameCube games. 80 percent, think about that percentage
for a moment. When Nintendo says they want to make the platform more 3rd
party friendly, then basically come right out and say the basically don't
support 3rd party developers, it can be quite perplexing. Apparently when
Nintendo said they had learned from past challenges they weren't talking
about making it easier and attracting more 3rd parties to develop on there
new system, they were just hoping to make it easier on them and close 2nd
party companies. Nintendo has practically ignored all 3rd party developed
games to this date with the exception of two. Soul Caliber 2 and Sonic
Adventure 2 were basically the only confirmed titles that Peter Main and
Saturo Iwata would talk about at a recent interview at Space World 2001
in Japan. When asked about SquareSoft, maker of the Final Fantasy series,
they just replied with an overwhelming "No Comment". It is this ignoring
and avoiding the topic of 3rd parties that Nintendo will almost certainly
regret in the future. But Nintendo wasn't always this cold to 3rd party
developers. Just go back long, long, ago.... way back to the days when
2 players was enough, when rumble paks and memory cards were not needed,
way back to the days of the Super Nintendo. Super Nintendo (SNES) was a
very successful system for Nintendo. The SNES had an excellent amount of
3rd party support. Looking back at the list off all games released for
the SNES, it still shocks you. The SNES was so good and popular that when
the Playstation came out it had trouble competing with the Super Nintendo.
But some where along the line, whether it was the 3rd parties on SNES leaving
for Playstation to pursue the 3D world of video games or something else
that drove Nintendo to ''disliking'' 3rd party developers or something
else. But as the Nintendo 64 made it's appearance, it failed to deliver
excellent top quality 3rd party games, one of the reasons it did so poor
in Japan. Nintendo needs to be more like they were in there Super Nintendo
days, more open to new 3rd parties, and making it easier to develop and
actually doing just that. No one wants to see the GameCube make the same
mistakes that the Nintendo 64. The GameCube should deliver the good 3rd
party games it is promising. But when Nintendo makes announcements that
they plan to produce 80% of all games released on the GameCube, it makes
you think. 3rd party developers are crucial to the GameCube's success just
as they are crucial to any systems success. Nintendo must be more open
to 3rd party developers, and accept the fact that they will need them to
beat out there competitors. If Nintendo fails to support 3rd parties, then
there GameCube is sure to fail as well.
By: Alex Zman |
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