If Nintendo repeats the Wii hardware strategy ...

[Viper1]

Soundwave said:

kitler53 said:

i have to disagree.

historically developers don't like to support console add-ons.  whether it's the balance board, wii motion plus, move, kinect, a 360 hard drive, whatever.  you won't get a 100% adoption rate and therefore you will limit your audience.  developers always seem to trend to the lowest common denominator and gaurenteed adoption. 

that's actually part of why the wii U won't really be better even if it is better.  we've already heard the darksiders developers say it... "blah blah it's powerful hardware"  "blah blah no we won't be improving textures, ect". 

Here's the difference though ... to make a balance board game ... you'd generally have to make one from scratch or kinda segment the game all over the place for people who have the board and those who don't. 

To make a Wii Motion + game that requires a good amount of time too or the game has to be specifically made for it.

To make a Wii U version in feature parity with the PS4/720/PC versions is easier because they already have all the assets just sitting there. It's just a matter of transferring them over to the Wii U provided it's powerful enough to run said assets. If it is, then hey why not. If it sells you an extra 100k, 200k, 300k, 400k, etc. copies of the Wii U version, you're already making 3 versions, a 4th to squeeze in extra sales is no biggie.

The industry is going to have to squeeze every dollar out of these "blockbuster" game releases because their budgets are going to be so huge, I mean you look at the Wii userbase -- 100 freaking million users, but it can't run Mass Effect. Now if you could make a way for the Wii to run Mass Effect, even if only lets say 40 million of that userbase had the add-on required for it -- if I'm the Mass Effect publisher, I'm saying ... go for it, we want that Nintendo money too.

The problem now is that your still have to release the game with 2 sets of game assets.   1 that can designed to work with the GPU upgrade and 1 lower quality set of assets that is designed to run on the base console.    Or you can take the risky route by requiring the GPU upgrade and leaving out the base console market entirely.