HoloDust said:
HappySqurriel said:
Certainly, the studio who you outsourced the Mass Effect 3 port wanted a budget large enough to support 2 years of work with 20 developers to ensure that the game looked as good as possible and fully took advantage of the Wii U but they were only given 9 months with 12 developers because EA thought that money would see a better return on a different project.
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That's where I see actual problem 3rd parties have - it's not that they can't make it look better, it's that WiiU is not strong enough to just port to it with somewhat higher settings and instanlty have better looking/performing version. If you have to spend some significant amount of extra cash to get the job done cause Ninty went tad cheap on some cruical components, that might avert early on some devs (like Metro devs) from porting at all, unless they see in some future significant user base that is actually buying usual PS30 "hardcore" titles on WiiU.
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7+ years of working on the XBox 360 and PS3 has ensured that they already have mature tools that are highly optimized for these platforms, to see a significant visual improvement without putting the time into optimizing the engine for the new platform would require dramatically more processing power. It would be possible to produce this hardware but I'm not convinced Nintendo could have and kept the system's price around $300.
As a rough guestimate, I would say that the typical consumer is willing to spend $25 or $50 more to get double the processing power, and if Nintendo was able to produce a system that was 4 times as powerful as the Wii U for $400 or $450 consumers might accept it; but I think that is highly unlikely and I think that increasing processing power past the current level risks losing more customers due to cost than Nintendo gains from performance.
