The New York Times examines the growing popularity of Nintendo's Wii in its native Japan, and attritubes the company's success to its newfound drive in wooing third-party developers and publishers. Nintendo is more forthcoming with their plans and ambitions than before, allowing third-party companies to take a greater part in guiding overall software development for the Wii. In short, it's becoming more cooperative with developers.

We also know from previous musings that Nintendo is explicit trying to make Wii development accomodating for third parties. So while CliffyB's brother might think that the success of Wii and DS "nongames" are causing developers to eschew production of "hardcore" games, companies like Namco Bandai are beginning to warm up to the Wii because next-gen game development is becoming a little too big budget for comfort.

The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles.

Nintendo’s new strategy is two-pronged. Making the Wii cheaper and easier to play than its rivals attracts a broader range of new customers, including people who never bought a game machine before... The other thrust of Nintendo’s new strategy is to enlist software developers like Namco Bandai to write more games for Wii than they did for previous Nintendo machines. Nintendo’s hope is that this will help erase one of Sony’s biggest past advantages: the far greater number of game titles available for its machines. The more games a machine has, the industry theory holds, the more gamers want to play it.

The Wii’s simplicity is also the selling point for software makers. [Square Enix's chief executive Yoichi Wada] said developers had been slower to write games for PlayStation 3 because of the greater complexity of the console’s main processor, the high-speed multi-core Cell Chip. He said PlayStation 3’s production delays had also made Sony slow to provide developers with the basic codes and software needed to write games for the new console.

At Namco Bandai, [CEO Shin Unozawa] said PlayStation 3 was so complex, with its faster speeds and more advanced graphics, that it might take 100 programmers a year to create a single game, at a cost of about $10 million. Creating a game for Wii costs only a third as much and requires only a third as many writers, he said.

Wolfwood via nytimes.com »