super6646 said:
No, it would be useless to port the game. Look at many other multiplats... they're sold much less on the Wii U (granted some publishers made ths situation dire, but still games where selling badly). On just 4 consoles, GTA 5 has sold roughly 40 million!!! Do you think the Wii U would've helped. Plus, the Wii U has sold terribly, and that is Nintendo's fault. They didn't market it, they used the name Wii U which made no sense. In a sense, they thought it'd sell if they slapped the nintendo logo on it and did nothing. It isn't the Wii U's fault for being last gen spec'd, as it could've still sold well. Nintendo didn't execute and market this console properly though, and in fact I STILL know lots of people who never even heard of a Wii U. Blame nintendo for the absence of 3rd parties... |
What you have just done is create a one-step argument. You think only of the immediate consequences, and not of any flow-on consequences.
Many people pay attention to GTA. If GTA were announced for Wii U, all of those people would see "Wii U" as one of the platforms the game is announced for. This would lead them to look further into the Wii U, and potentially decide to get one. This means that it would have helped with marketing.
The Wii U is distinctly stronger in many ways than the 360 or PS3. As such, a properly-developed Wii U version would have better graphics, additional features, etc. Add in the unique capabilities of the Wii U, and the Wii U could have been the "definitive" version of the game as at initial release (we'll set aside the later PS4/XBO releases). And thus, the game would benefit.
But those are still just two-step thoughts. Let's look a bit further down the chain. GTA lovers buying a Wii U for the game would not only buy GTA. Many third party games would be in their sights, as would games like W101 and Bayonetta 2. If we suppose that just 1 million people bought GTA for Wii U, and that each of them bought two other third party games. That's another 2 million copies spread across games like CoD, AC, Batman, etc. In reality, it would probably be more than just two other third party games - heck, I bought the system primarily for Nintendo games, and I own five third party titles (I would own more, but circumstances limit me).
But more than that, it would establish Take Two on the system while many other third parties are ignoring the market. As such, this untapped market would flow almost entirely to Take Two.
We're talking about a franchise that routinely sells in the tens of millions per console, which for one-step thinking becomes "so putting it on a system that it'll only sell 2 million on is a bad idea"... but it's very short-sighted. Look for a moment at Lego City Undercover. It could be described as "colourful, pseudo-GTA". And it sold well. It would make sense to think that most of the people who bought that game did so primarily because they wanted an open-world game like GTA. It would also make sense to think that those people would show it off to their friends. Considering the online features, those friends would likely consider getting a Wii U and the game.
So in effect, we now have the game triggering even more marketing through word of mouth. And that word of mouth would continue to stretch through. Gamers who mostly play Nintendo games (in part due to lack of solid third-party support) would be brought into the GTA fanbase - recall, Nintendo managed to sell 20 million Gamecubes almost entirely on their own core fanbase; even if only a quarter of them took an interest in GTA, that would be 5 million.
Since there's strong suggestion that the game engine was working on the system, the main bulk of the development was effectively done - much of the rest would come down to common elements of development, like asset creation and scripting, both of which only required a few programmers to port across. So we're essentially talking about a lot of potential and not a lot of difficulty. Unfortunately, it is automatically judged as a "risk" by modern gaming companies, and thus they don't even try.
