Top Japanese producers comment on Wii U

[HappySqurriel]

Before the Wii was announced, publishers decided that they were going to manage the exploding costs of development by releasing games to as many platforms as they possibly could without incurring significant additional development costs; on top of this, publishers kept their best teams and IPs focused on these larger budget projects to give them the best opportunity for success. With how different the Wii was (both technically and conceptually) developers had to build games from the ground up to create meaningful experiences for the Wii. With the best developers, IPs and financial resources tied up in HD console games the Wii was left with mediocre (or worse) developers working with unknown IPs and shoestring budgets.

With development costs increasing further it is likely that publishers will try to broaden the number of platforms that games are going to be released to. This may translate into a very broad range of processing power supported (tablets and previous generation consoles, through current generation consoles, to high end PCs) and a very diverse set of user input devices (controllers, touch screens, keyboards/mice). In ways this has the potential to play out very well for the Wii U because (from the rumours) the Wii U will probably fall in the middle of the processing power range developers will be targeting which should ensure most games will take advantage of its capabilities, and the controller may allow developers to take the best elements from multiple versions of the game and combine them together in the Wii U version; and there is the possibility that, for less than the cost of a low end casual game, developers will be able to add platform specific features to make the Wii U version stand out.

In contrast, if the Wii U had bleeding edge graphical capabilities they would (mostly) go unused because the additional cost required for the additional gain in sales would discourage publishers from making the investment; and if the Wii U had a completely revolutionary controller developers would have to devote too much time/effort into redesigning a game from scratch and the project would likely never get started.

Now, it is obvious that the Wii U will probably not gain dominance by simply leaching modified ports from current and next generation platforms and this leaves a significant challenge for Nintendo to deal with. In my opinion, Nintendo will need to find new game-play experiences similar to what they did with Brain Age, Nintendogs, Wii Sports, and Wii Fit as well as re-invigorate ignored genres like they have with New Super Mario Bros to really distinguish their system in the market.

Or to simplify, the Wii U could be more viable at preventing owners from buying the next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft but first it needs to find a reason for people to have it in their home.