Nintendo made their strategy pretty clear RE: the 3DS. Make some room for third-parties at launch, let them get some sales and bring in a new audience, etc. I'm not sure that Nintendogs underwhelming performance was a part of that strategy, but STILL...

Thing is, I'm not sure that it worked. At all. Street Fighter sold alright. LEGO Star Wars probably did okay. Everything else? Maybe not so much. And Nintendo is firing the big guns this holiday season. BLAM! Super Mario 3DS. BLAM BLAM!! Mario Kart 3DS. In addition to, without belaboring the gun metaphor, Ocarina, Star Fox 64, and Luigi's Mansion 2. So, seeya, third-parties, I guess?

I mean, MK3DS is going to be sold at basically a 1:1 ratio with the system from now on. SM3DS won't be as ubiquitous as NSMB on the DS, but it'll be significant. And as much as it pains me, Ocarina and Star Fox 64 will probably be nostalgia-fueled system-sellers. And it's not like Nintendo is going to stop releasing games after that. Have third-parties squandered their chance? Did they ever have one to begin with?

Or am I being too pessimistic? I mean, it was pretty much the same story on the DS, and that had pretty good third-party support. But will that support remain in the Vita/iPhone era?

Let's at least let Resident Evil come out and then think about it, no? I mean, that's and Metal Gear are HUGE guns that will decide a lot of things I think.

RE(: Revelations), probably. An MGS remake that is also being re-released in HD? Naaaaah.

I think we need more time. SSFIV3D did sell well (I think it is currently the system's best seller, aside from OoT which will soon dethrone it), and I think Resident Evil: Revelations will sell big numbers, as will Kingdom Hearts: 3D and other heavy hitters. I'm not worried yet. I think the 3DS will have plenty of legs. The eShop will help fuel lower-budget games immensely.

Of the third-party games that I have played, DoA:D lacks online options (and has occasional online hiccups) but is otherwise solid (and makes EXCELLENT use of SpotPass) and SSFIV3D is also rock solid. Clone Wars 3D needed some more polish, but it's not a terrible launch game.

@Anand I hope not. I really want to play some 3DS Castlevania.

By the way, I added this Roundtable to the Official Negative World 3DS Links Thread.

Inb4 kriswright mentions you forgot Kid Icarus Uprising.

To answer your question, I will say 'sort of'. The 3DS will get the same type of third-party support that the DS got which is good, but not great. The reason to own a 3DS will still be the first-party gems.

@-JKR-
I dunno if a port of MGS3 is really that huge of a gun, you can get the PS2 game used for like $5 and it's probably going to control a lot worse on the 3DS due to the lack of a second analog stick. Resident Evil Revelations should definitely appeal to the RE4 fanbase though, we've been waiting for a return to form for a long time!

@deathly_hallows

You can get OoT used for like $5 too, but we're not going to take bets on that selling well or not.

The third parties will go where the install base is and right now everything just feels like a repeat of the DS vs. PSP story to me. It's definitely not a sure thing, but my money is on the 3DS to collect the 3rd party gold.

Sony may be a little hungrier this time - and the price point isn't so bad as before - but their M.O. is still the same. They're still bringing their big franchises to the Vita in an attempt to bring cinematic console games to a handheld. I suppose what I'd ask is whether the owners of PSPs felt that Sony got it right last time. Did they enjoy playing those games on their handhelds more than the potential experiences on the DS? If they did, then the Vita might have legs and the 3rd parties might take notice and eventually follow Sony. But Nintendo is making a pretty obvious effort to attract 3rd parties, too. Plus there's their long history of success with handhelds. Plus production costs, etc. 3rd party developers always seem pretty conservative to me and that would mean Nintendo surely has to be the favorite, here. IMHO.

Sidenote: I think the real reason the 3DS has been a slow starter, apart from the obvious lack of games, is that Nintendo overdid it with the different iterations of the DS (and, to a lesser degree, GBA). There are a lot of people who want a 3DS who don't want to be conned into buying the "crappy" Phat version just because they couldn't wait a year for the inevitable Lite/i/XL/WTF. If the 3DS stalls, leaving an opening for the Vita, surely the multiple iteration problem is partly to blame. Classic Boy Who Cried Wolf.

EDIT: Oh, and you forgot Kid Icarus: Uprising.

@-JKR-
But OoT is a remake with improved graphics and features. If you look at the trailer for MGS3 from E3 it's just a straight port, so except for the added 3-D it's basically a downgrade. Plus MGS3 doesn't have the same mass appeal to the Nintendo fanbase that OoT does.

I'll bet you a fake dollar that OoT sells at least 10x more than MGS3!

@kriswright
The PSP and Vita are not the same. Vita has a large OLED mult-touch screen, two real analog sticks, and motion controls to boot, it's a way more capable machine.

Again? The third party support on the DS was/is a lot better than the Wii. Granted, Mario Kart DS continues to sell to this day. NSMB as well as the Brain Age series and Nintendogs also sold exorbitant amounts. The DS still had great titles that did well for themselves.

GTA Chinatown Wars come to mind. Over a million units sold.

Dragon Quest IX, Final Fantasy IV and those are all big AAA franchises, especially Dragon Quest since it had a numbered sequel on a handheld. Then we have plenty of big franchises that had multiple iterations on the console like Castlevania. Even though they sold around the 300k mark, the games must have been on some level successful, otherwise they wouldn't have made two more games. We mustn't forget Professor Layton is really a third party franchise. Although I think Nintendo has the publishing rights outside Japan. Then we have Scribblenauts, Okamiden, Phoenix Wright, etc.

I went off on a tangent there. Anyway, the 3DS will pick up steam, don't worry. The DS didn't have many games during its first year.

anon_mastermind said:

To answer your question, I will say 'sort of'. The 3DS will get the same type of third-party support that the DS got which is good, but not great. The reason to own a 3DS will still be the first-party gems.

Do I have the bead on this wrong? I always thought the DS was considered to have had really great third party support. All those Final Fantasy games and stuff.

deathly_hallows said:

@kriswright
The PSP and Vita are not the same. Vita has a large OLED mult-touch screen, two real analog sticks, and motion controls to boot, it's a way more capable machine.

The hardware is much better, yes, but their software philosophy is the same as far as I can tell. That's what kriswright was trying to say.

I worry that we didn't get a great deal of third party games announced for 3DS (I can't think of any off the top of my head) and I just hope that in these economic times publishers are waiting for a decent install base before committing titles to a platform, I still believe that the 3DS is going to trump the Vita this gen but its going to be a much closer race than DS Vs. PSP

@deathly_hallows
I understand that. But is there really a difference in philosophy at work with the Vita? Is it revolutionary, really? I mean, couldn't you easily just call the Vita the "PSP 2" without anyone looking at you funny? It's not like Sony has revealed something wholly unexpected here, have they? It's an evolution of the direction they were already going, touchscreen or not.

I'm not saying that guarantees they won't do any better than they did with the PSP, only I don't see how it's going to make a different case to the potential customers who already passed on the PSP last gen. Sony is still all about console games on a portable, right? And despite the fact that the gaming press is getting behind the Vita in a big way, it feels nothing to me like the earth-shaking hype we saw for the PSP, where everyone was shouting Nintendoomed from the tops of random skyscrapers for two whole years.

EDIT: ludist210 took the words right out of my mouth. In fact, he said it quicker and neater than I did. Good work.

@ludist210
But the PSP hardware was incapable of delivering on that philosophy, the Vita doesn't have that problem. That's why I don't think you can make a 1:1 analogy of PSP to Vita. The Vita is a brand new beast, it's future is really hard to predict at this point, we've never seen a handheld this capable.

@deathly_hallows
Am I right in assuming you think the PSP failed because it didn't have two analog sticks?

[ref=id=5909&pagenumber=1#156678]kriswright said:[/ref][quote][ref=id=5909&pagenumber=1#156662]anon_mastermind said:[/ref][quote]To answer your question, I will say 'sort of'. The 3DS will get the same type of third-party support that the DS got which is good, but not great. The reason to own a 3DS will still be the first-party gems.[/quote]
Do I have the bead on this wrong? I always thought the DS was considered to have had really great third party support. All those Final Fantasy games and stuff.[/quote]
Honestly I own more third party games than first party. And I prefer my third party games. Mario Kart DS killed the franchise. The rubber band AI captained by the dreaded red shell made single player tedious. And online was plagued by snakers. The latter was fixed but the former still remains. I guess when you sell as much as Mario Kart, you don't need to change a lot regardless of how much a small number of forum users complaint.

New Super Mario Bros was a good game, but it's not a classic imo. The first DS Zelda I liked, although I really hated the second one. The train made the travel too tedious to bear. I didn't even finish that game. Mario and Luigi PiT started well, but I ended up despising the story. I started a file in Bowser's Inside Story a few months ago. I didn't really get far into the game until my niece accidentally deleted my file. From what I played though, the amount of hand-holding in the game was insulting. Even if I were ten years younger I'm sure I wouldn't need every.single.thing explained to me. And even if I did, I'm sure that was not an ideal way to do it.

Soo, yea. There you go.


[ref=id=5909&pagenumber=1#156687]@deathly_hallows[/ref]

I feel as if we should be having this discussion in my thread. I feel like I've been here before.

@Tranquilo
Yeah, that's probably my fault. Sorry about that. Back on topic: 3DS 3rd party support. Coming or not coming? I vote coming.

kriswright said:

@deathly_hallows
Am I right in assuming you think the PSP failed because it didn't have two analog sticks?

That's one big reason, it didn't have parity with what consoles could deliver in terms of controls and features, making practically every game on the system much worse than the console equivalent. The combo of the relatively massive OLED screen, dual analog, the multitouch inputs, motion controls, cameras, and full-featured online make the Vita just as capable as the PS3, and in some ways moreso. I think it's foolish to write it off under the banner "the PSP proves gamers don't want console like experiences on a handheld", we don't know if that's the case because the PSP didn't deliver on what Sony originally promised. It was never a portable PS2, it had the graphics, but that's about it.

@deathly_hallows Even taking out the control lackings, most of the PS3-like games that I played on PSP were lesser experiences on a core level. I'm just not sure if a publisher is ever going to put the same resources into something like Uncharted Vita as they would Uncharted 3, which means that you never really get that console experience on the go, you get a slightly watered down version.