Bethesda wary of Wii U: ‘it doesn’t support our games’

[TomaTito]

twesterm said:

Mr Khan said:

twesterm said:

It's honestly one of those chicken or the egg problems, both sides are pretty valid.

Personally, while I would love to see more awesome games on my Nintendo consoles I side with the publishers on this one.  Like I said, making even a modest budget game is a massive risk with little reward.  You want to do everything possible to mitigate that risk.  If that means not developing for a console that likely will not sell well, you don't develop for it.

The multiplatting mitigates the risk on its own. Remember: it took a team of a few guys (under 10) from Vigil something like 5 weeks to get a build of Darksiders II running on Wii U. With that comparatively tiny amount of man-hours they just tacked on at least (lowball estimate) another 200,000 sales for the game, or another 10 million in revenue (less overhead and publisher/retailer cut and all, but still, that makes up for the porting effort by a huge factor)

They're creating *more* risk for themselves by *not* putting it on Wii U

Different engines, different problems (Bethesda is great example of that idea).  We also don't know how well Darksiders II works on WiiU.  There's a *huge* difference between running and running well.  Again, thinking of Bethesda, Skyrim runs on the PS3 and I'm sure even Dawnguard runs on the PS3, it just doesn't really run at an acceptable quality level.  It will take a lot more effort to work that problem out.

It might have only taken 10 guys 5 weeks to get the game to work, but it would take more time and more staff (QA) to verify that it's shipping quality and pass TRC requirements.

Wii U ports cost under $1.3 million for Ubisoft
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-23-ubisoft-says-wii-u-ports-costing-under-USD1-3-million