Contrary to what Todd Mitchell of Kaufman Bros. Equity Research has said, IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon has stated that the commercial success of the Wii and the DS will be good for the market. However, he also noted that this comes with new problems in terms of publishing games.

According to Pidgeon Nintendo's Wii and the DS "raise the challenge with alternative interfaces, and publishers with titles that are optimised for those interfaces have the best opportunity to leverage the broader installed base for the DS and for the potentially broader base of the Wii."

It's always been a given that publishers of games have optimized their releases for the platform it was intended for. From his statement, it is more important now, more than ever, for publishers to stand up and take notice that people actually want their games to take advantage of the hardware they bought. Pidgeon even went so far as to say that "publishers that provide quick and careless original and licensed titles or shoehorned ports of games designed for other platforms are going to suffer, as they should."

Regarding the actual statement that Nintendo's success is bad for the market, it turns out this is not a new issue and began in the 8-bit days, Pidgeon revealed.

The idea that Nintendo is bad for third-party publishers is a myth with roots in the 8bit -16bit days when Nintendo and Sega manufactured cartridges and the third party publishers felt they got short shrift in the production line.With N64 and GameCube, Nintendo suffered from a lack of third-party support and most of the third party titles that were published on Nintendo's platforms were slapped together ports of games for other systems

While it may seem that Nintendo can do no wrong, it is important for their continued success to have third-party publishers producing games developed utilizing the Wii and DS' technologies. We can expect to hear more about this issue in the near future as more and more Wii games and DS titles invade the video games market. If you want to read more on what Billy Pidgeon said, click on the read link.