Gamasutra has some thoughts from game developers, executives, and industry watchers this week about third-party Wii development, and how the industry seems to be slowly coming to grips with how to sell games on Nintendo’s platform.
The piece paints an interesting picture of how the divide between game developers’ predilections towards hard-core games and their understanding of casual consumers’ wants and needs seems to be narrowing, as in this story from the development of the Wii version of Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding:
For instance, the testers seemed to have problems using their balance board to jump onto a rail. The team decided to code an "automatic magnet" on the rail so all the snowboarder had to do was move near the rail and the jump would happen automatically.
"We were then concerned that we’d eliminated some of the challenge," says Guignard, "but the testers seemed pleased."