Did anyone catch this article on Gamedaily BIZ today.

 

Reggie Fils-Aime: Concerns Over Wii Being a Fad 'Overblown'

 

Alright, first of all let's talk about the title of the piece.  Doesn't it imply that concerns over the wii being a fad are partially true? Second what about the total lack of statistics in the piece.  What does "play Wii more now than ever" mean anyway?  I mean I am sure that people are playing more than Wii sports now given that back then there wasn't much else to play.  Now there are several more Ninendo published titles to play.  And that is just the problem.  If you check the NPD data, what is significant is the absence of third party publishers from top of Wii title sales.  Is that a healthy ecosystem I ask you?

 

As for "LittleBigPlanet" and "Halo" - well, sure, everyone likes the look of LittleBigPlanet, I don't think there is any way in hell that one will see it coming to the wii ever.  Besides could wii even handle the back end user generated content sharing of do-it-yourself levels that makes the game so cool anyway?  You have to assume that PS3 can, I know very well that Xbox 360 can.  Same goes for Halo of course, don't think for a minute that that property is ever coming to anything that is not Xbox or Windows. No rumor mongers spreading false hope that Reggie has Halo coming to the wii.  Aha ha ha hahahaha.

 

Today - I'm still in the hospital helping my injured mother.  It sucks.  Things I hate: hospitals, rednecks, rough nurses, hospital food, the shitty red mustang from the rental company.  Things I like: the coffee shop in the hospital, wide parking lots, nurses (the nice ones), wireless in the hospital, cellphones.

 

Things I did today from the hospital - redesigned the business model of a potential game, discussed a due diligence, sent out a redline draft of an agreement, sent out a rejection of a pitch. 

 

OK - time to eat dinner.  Coming up in next episode - pictures of the cars in the accident.

 

I was in the middle of a due diligence on a developer today when I got the call that my mother had been in a car accident and was in the hospital.  That pretty much put a kink in my day as I scrambled around to figure out flights to Savannah, Georgia where my mom lives and cancelled my flight back home to Redmond.  Thus I end up here at LAX at midnight.  I came to the check-in counter only to find out that the travel service had booked me on tomorrow's redeye flight.  Ended up having to buy first class to get on an already sold out redeye flight to Atlanta that leaves tonight?!!?!?! Then the gate announces that the pilot misread the flight schedule and was driving to the airport now from San Diego setting our departure time back by 2 hours.  One of those days that nothing seems to go right.

 

But in between all the chaos, I was still paying attention to the due diligence. It is always a pleasure to meet a studio full of talented and passionate people hell-bent on creating the game their way, the way the vision lives in their heads.  A great developer marries vision with an incredible ability to execute and do so relatively on time and budget.  Maybe this is what the average reader might expect from any game developer but sadly it is not so.  Many developers are houses of ambition and little else.  And the studios that lack even ambition are sad places to see indeed.  You know them when you see them. 

 

I know that game development is supposed to be glamorous but when you are on the publisher's side, being an independent developer looks far from glamorous.  The only exception is when you see a great developer having fun doing what they do the way they want to do.  Seeing this, even the publisher drones like myself, take strength, envy and long for something greater.

 

Remember boys and girls who write in everyday with hopes to sell that great RPG or FPS concept that lives in your heads that game ideas are like poetry.  No one will buy them from you and almost no one is interested.  Ideas are cheap and execution is everything.

Anyone read this article in GameDaily?

 

 

Uh, right.  Sometimes I have doubts about N'Gai Croal's knowledge of the game industry.  His analysis sometimes seem to lack depth and I find it dissapointing because I expect better.  For example, is it meaningful to portray an MGS in trouble without seeking out the answer to the most fundamental question: does MGS own the IP rights to Halo, PGR, and Mass Effect?  And FASA, was dissolving FASA a mark against MGS or a prudent management decision?  If MGS owns and thereby controls the IP to Halo and Bungie is still committed to making Halo titles (a sure multimillion dollar paycheck must be hard to walk away from) is there any real change at all in the status quo for Xboxland?  Is Halo 4 coming to the wii?  Do you really think so? If MGS controls the IP to PGR and Mass Effect and those studios are unable to work on those titles going forward, it strikes me that the only issue MGS faces is choosing a great developer to line up against such great IP. 

 

And I think there is a suspicious lack of balance in that N'Gai blogs about MGS' doom without even mentioning that MGS purchased Lionhead and as a result clearly controls the future of the Fable franchise with Fable 2 being a highly anticipated Xbox 360 release. What about Turn10 Studios that MGS owns and uses to develop the multi-million selling exclusive Forza racing franchise?  What about yet another JRPG Lost Odyssey by Sakaguchi that is coming to Xbox 360 courtesy of MGS?

 

Yes publishers undeniably are on a bit of an developer acqusition extravaganza these days.  Certainly the Bioware/Pandemic acquisition by EA for $860M raised more than a few eyebrows. Inside MGS we couldn't stop talking about it when it happened.  It caused as much fuss as the day Nintendo announced the real name of "The Revolution" would be "The Wii".  Anyway, $860m - those kinds of numbers always seemed to belong to companies outside the video game industry.  It was both a shock and a pleasant surprise to see such a high value deal get transacted.  Like your little baby was suddenly all growed up. 

 

Personally, I'm very happy about all these changes in our competitive landscape.  It keeps me on my toes looking for one more elusive and beautiful multi-million seller title for MGS to sign.

 

 

Lately I've started to see reports out of Japan that confirm what I have been thinking about the wii.  According to some reports, up to 60% of wii owners are just letting them collect dust.  They bought them as a novelty and haven't used them since playing wii sports.  This would explain the low attach rate of 2 per box relative to Xbox's attach rate which is more than 3x that.

 

The wii is a fun box, but is it the kind of fun you can't put down?  This is not a knock on the DS.  That is totally NOT a fad.  Is the wii the next EyeToy?