dammitmattt said:
The problem is really quite deep. Xbox360 by virtue of a year head start and the PS3 practically doubling the installed based of HD consoles in the past 18 months has benefited to the most, but as Charlequin pointed out, diversity is a very amorphous kind of thing.
We can point to the PS2 as a model, but the natural instinct is almost always to go to a list of games and point out corresponding titles on existing platforms.
I hate to use the word 'ecosystem' but it does pretty much describe what is needed for any platform to have the games library that is not only self sustaining but have a diversity in both the types of games released and the number of games released.
I just don't see that happening with HD platforms when each release is a multi million dollar bet competing against other multi million dollar bets and the Wii is treated by too many third parties as a cash cow, where they throw as little money as possible to the platform and want/expect the a large return.
There needs to be a healthy cycle of investment, risk, profit and it's simply not happening and it certainly wont happen with the HD consoles without the installed base or massive subsidies. The current subsidies in place only serve the interest of the manufacturers who conveniently need killer apps of their own.
Like a good industrialized economy, you can't just have a top tier of good games and followed by a cliff. There's a lack in diversity of middling games. Niche games. Games not everyone will like but will find a cult following and it's not enough to point to one or two titles, there has to be a critical mass of them.
