| flagstaad said: You are mistaken, the publisher is the one who approves the budget so they make the final choice to do an additional sku or not. Of course is important that the development wants to create a version for the console in the first place, but the final word is given by the publisher. The last 2 cases of games not comming to Wii U were Crysis 3 (developer told it was bussines decision aka the publisher said no) and Castlevania LoS 2 (the developer was not big enough to handle more skus and publisher did not increased the budget to allow the dev to grow). You will find few cases were the developer don't want to create a version for everything under the sun, because that means they get experience and kits for every console/device possible but the approval is given by the publisher that is thinking only in money terms. The grip last time was that the Wii was way underpowered so publisher asked to a smaller/more willing developer to do that sku, like in the case of CoD Modern Warfare titles, were IW said they did not wanted to create Wii versions and Activision told Treyarch to do it, but that make them miss one of the editions. |
It depends on the game. For instance, The Conduit was made by High Voltage Software, and then Sega became the distributing publisher. What this means is that the game itself was funded by HVS directly, and then Sega just handles the costs of things like pressing the discs, advertising, shipping, etc.
Since the biggest of the publishing costs - advertising - doesn't increase with an additional SKU, distributing publishers are unlikely to mind an additional SKU being added.
On the other hand, some games are fully or mostly funded by the publisher. This is what is happening with Crysis 3. In this case, development costs increase when an additional SKU is added, and thus the cost to the publisher is significantly higher. As such, the publisher is going to be more careful about the decision to allow an additional SKU.
What makes me think that this game is a case of the former is that Terminal Reality, the developer, is very much an independent developer - their last game, Kinect Star Wars, was published by LucasArts. The one before that was published by Atari (Sony in Europe for the PS* versions), and before that was three SNK games and a Midway game. The one before those was a Majesco game.
This is not a developer that is in any way tied to a publisher (like Crytek is primarily tied to EA in recent times), and this isn't an IP owned (or licensed) by the publisher, so the chances are high that it's a distributing publisher situation. But I do recognise that I could be wrong.
By the way, I highly doubt that Activision asked Treyarch to do Modern Warfare for the Wii. If Activision had wanted MW for the Wii, they'd have asked Treyarch to do it for release at the same time as the other versions, not two years later. Since they had n-Space make the DS version for release in 2007, we know that they didn't have a problem asking for secondary studios to have simultaneous release. And Activision barely even acknowledged Reflex Edition - you don't specifically ask a studio to make a port of a game, and then fail to properly advertise its existence. More likely is that Treyarch approached Activision with the idea, and Activision begrudgingly gave them a small budget.
