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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Rumor: GTA V was once prototyped for Wii U

Aielyn on 27 March 2015
Dr.Vita said:
I doubt it, this is impossible.
GTA never released on a Nintendo home console, even not on Wii (which won the generation). Why should they wanted to release GTA V on Wii U? It is selling much worse than Wii and is not their target group. I said it and I will say it again, GTA V on Vita would be more profitable than GTA V on Wii U. GTA belongs to Playstation!!!

So you claim that it would sell better on Vita than on Wii U on the basis that they haven't even tested the Nintendo home console market? Kind of like going "Since I've never won a game of tennis, I should never try to play tennis in the first place".

And you claim that GTA belongs to PlayStation. If that were true, wouldn't Chinatown Wars have performed better on PSP than on DS? After all, the PSP was clearly the technically better system, and the market was clearly Playstation users. So on the basis of your assertion, Chinatown Wars PSP should have thrashed the DS version. Remind me - what happened? Or are you going to suggest that all those PS2/PS3 gamers were playing Chinatown Wars on DS rather than PSP because magic?

It seems to me that a market that they've never tested is an obvious one to test. Releasing one major GTA title would be a sensible way to test the market. And even in the worst case scenario, they'd make back the excess cost, because GTA is pretty much guaranteed to sell well, and porting wouldn't be difficult.

I always laugh when I see people invoke terms like "target group" or "demographics" (yes, I know you didn't say this one, I'm referring to it as being like the one you said), because it shows a complete lack of understanding of business, and especially of what it was that made the Wii so successful. Recall that "Blue Ocean Strategy" that Iwata was always talking about? It's the concept that, when you start serving a section of the market that hasn't been served, you do very well (obviously, I'm very much simplifying). It's also the only way to grow the industry - by serving customers that otherwise haven't been served.



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Materia-Blade on 27 March 2015
Ruler said:
What a waste of money, if they spent time and money on it they could just as well release it for the wiiu. Given its gta it should sell 2/3/4/5 million + on the wiiu

Fixed for you.



Materia-Blade on 27 March 2015

It was stupid not to port the 6th gen GTAs on wii and way more stupid not to port GTA V to wii u. the thing was announced in 2012 right? they could have started the porting before the wii u released or even right after it and still get it ready for september 2013. not only they didn't do that, they ported it to ps4 and x1 and not to wii u, wich makes even less sense.



super6646 on 27 March 2015
Aielyn said:
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.


Even if GTA 5 would go to the Wii U, you wouldn't have those "proper" since it'd cost too much to implement. And you think it'd sell 5 million!!!! It probably won't sell that much on the XB1! Sure sure, what about maybe revise that down to a million. Look at OTHER third party games and see what everyone said! COD: OMG ITS GONNA SELL LIKE HOTCAKES ON THE WII U, THANK U ACTIVISION UR THE BEST!!! Watch Dogs: OMG LOL LOL LOL WII U IS GOING TO WIN IT, OH YEAH!!!! Ok maybe I'm joking around a little, but both of those games failed, and sold millions on the xbox and playstation. And as for helping the Wii U, the 3rd party publishers don't give a rats @** about how it performs since its already outsold by both the PS4 and XB1, even though they've been out for barely over 1/2 the time. And as for risk, yeah sorry when games cost millions to develop and they fail, what happens? People don't make money, people get laid off, and investors trash the company. You may not care, but maybe losing all those great franchises would make you care!



Materia-Blade on 27 March 2015
zumnupy10 said:
SpokenTruth said:

You said Nintendo.  You didn't say only home console.  

Google the other 2.  Rockstars most violent game ever was on a Nintendo console.


The most important thing to know is how much these games sold on Wii.  That might explain Why Rockstar didn't care to release GTA V on WiiU.

If anything, those games sales prove that THEY HAD to release GTA V on wii u. manhunt 2 sold the same as the ps2 version with a simultaneous release. bully had about half the sales of ps2 version while two years late.



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Yakuzaice on 27 March 2015
Materia-Blade said:

If anything, those games sales prove that THEY HAD to release GTA V on wii u. manhunt 2 sold the same as the ps2 version with a simultaneous release. bully had about half the sales of ps2 version while two years late.

I can't seem to find any info for US Manhunt 2 sales in October which covers the launch week, but the sales VGC shows for November are significantly different from NPD.  They seem to have it at 18.5k for the month while VGC shows 61k.

VGC also only shows 30k in Europe for Bully PS2.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that probably isn't accurate.  You can't really take VGC at face value on a lot of these older games (or new ones for that matter).  In some cases they even had tracked these games at one point, but VGC did something with their database and purged a lot of PS2 sales data.



Ruler on 27 March 2015
cycycychris said:
I think it was pretty obvious that they probably got a Dev kit from Nintendo(since they were for sure trying to court them to bring it to the Wii U) and tested it out. I think they just still had the kiddy image in there head and upper management said no. I wouldn't say this would save the Wii U, but it would have sold well and I think the Wii U would be in much better shape right now. One of Nintendo biggest fuck ups was not paying for a port of this game.


Imagine them paying every dev for a port who brings 0 money, they wouldnt publish the game but rockstars. Nintendo did it right



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Mr Khan on 27 March 2015

Again, Wii U was abandoned before PS3/360, and yet people think that Nintendo giving hardware parity would get them software.



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TheGoldenBoy on 27 March 2015
Materia-Blade said:

It was stupid not to port the 6th gen GTAs on wii and way more stupid not to port GTA V to wii u. the thing was announced in 2012 right? they could have started the porting before the wii u released or even right after it and still get it ready for september 2013. not only they didn't do that, they ported it to ps4 and x1 and not to wii u, wich makes even less sense.

That might have been the stupidest thing I have read today. Porting GTA V to the PS4 and XBO makes less sense than it would have to the Wii U? GTA V's target audience is completely on those systems unlike the Wii U.



EricFabian on 27 March 2015

GTA can sell any console. We all know that



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