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albionus on 15 August 2007
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Sqrl said:
@Albionus,

You are way oversimplifying things.  These developers are not complete newbs off the streets..even the rookie teams.  They have all seen a wide variety of hardware and know how to compensate for nuances in the hardware.

Aside from that I am not sure how you could of been contemplating this issue since the launch of the Wii since there would of been a serious lack of information to contemplate...but ok sure.  

The thing most people aren't getting yet is that the Wii has about a 12 month full dev cycle and the PS3/360 has about an 18 month full Dev Cycle.  When you take into account that the majority of veteran teams are working on the PS3/360 projects 6-9 months before launch you have a situation where these veteran teams aren't even going to start working on Wii projects for at most 3 months and as early as a week from now.  And even then it would be another year before the game was released.

The point that most companies started to understand how successful the Wii is being is when they started to shift their resources.  Anything before then is going to continue lest they waste thousands of man hours.  Its not as if the Wii doesn't have good games coming out these holidays but you aren't going to be seeing superb 3rd party games for at least another 4-6 months.  And we are already seeing companies announce some interesting new IPs for the Wii.

Frankly this topic is old, and has been discussed numerous times before, I am not sure why it needs to be addressed again now that it makes even less sense than it did before.
First paragraph, it sure isn't showing if even rookie teams can quickly get around the nuances and differences in architecture.  I know in theory they should be able to but reality and theory are usually different as they appear to be in this case.   For example, in theory the veteran teams at EA should have been able to get the PS3 Madden running at 60 FPS but they didn't.  I could also go into examples like the Saturn or N64 but that should suffice.  Unfortunately as you mention this is an old topic so I don't know where the old stories are I've read about developer issues and complaints with the TEV's (essentially IIRC it's 8 year old technology that no one else uses so few devs have any experience working with them directly). 

Next paragraph, what information was lacking at launch beside the TEV count of the Wii?  Last Nov we knew the rest of the Wii's tech specs and could already see the launch games and upcoming games looked PS2ish.  Not much has been added since then except more PS2ish looking games.  Yes as you said this topic is old, which means the information is old.

As for the rest I already said I agreed with it except that I don't think it explains everything. I do have to say though that your defense of software programmers reminds me of when I said motion controls on early Wii games suffered because they had to program the motions in complex multivariable calculus.  Several posters jumped to the defense of software programmers since they take plenty of calculus in college so it couldn't be an issue (they could have said I was "oversimplifying it").  I had to find the article where actual developers said they were having trouble with motion controls due to the complex math involved which shows that just because someone, even a software programmer, should be able to do something doesn't mean they can do it easily or well.