While a miniscule number of industry watchers, (GamerNode among this select group), predicted the surprise success of the Wii many months before its debut, one group-game developers-were totally taken off guard by the deluge of interest generated by the dark horse entry in the next gen console race.Wall Street is seeing this lapse of foresight as a crucial error for many game developers. James Lin, a consultant with Simba Group, said they “weren,t expecting anything,” from Wii’s showing at E3. A report released by TheStreet.com quoted one securities manager as saying, "No one’s going to make money on the software except Ubisoft. Everyone [else] got caught flat-footed." Ubisoft, to their credit, decided to support the Wii and displayed their game, Red Steel, at the E3 convention.One game publisher left out of the loop, offered his take on the situation. Midway exec Miguel Iribarren told TheStreet, "We didn’t have the information to work off of. I think everyone pushed [the Wii] to the back burner till they got the information on the machine itself and the business model."
All is not lost for the latecomers, because the Wii is very inexpensive to develop for compared to its competitors (dev-kits are only $2000).
