Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:
EA is hardly going to be the only company that treats the Wii U like garbage.
If Nintendo wanted third party support then they should've just basically let third parties approve the hardware. I mean who cares, the EAD teams will make a great game even if you put a gun to their head and forced them to work on a 25 year old Sega Genesis chipset.
Making a chipset the "Nintendo way" = no third party support. That's all there is to it, these other companies don't have the time to waste on some experimental platform, either bring a modern console to the market or get lost, there's 140 million PS3/360s already out there for developers to make money off of if they want a chipset that performs like it's from 2006.
This isn't about "making friends", this is just a business. Nintendo is irrelevant enough to a lot of third parties that simply ignoring Nintendo is a very viable option when time/cost investments are factored into the equation. If Nintendo wanted to change that, they should've made a different type of hardware system. Period.
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They made the Gamecube chipset modern for third parties and that got great third party support... oh wait, it was snubbed too.
If you invest in an audience early on, you build a base for yourself for future sales. Wii U represents a potential base; devs aren't investing in it, and as a result they're leaving potential profit on the table. Porting to Wii U well isn't that expensive.
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The GameCube wasn't snubbed by third parties. It had a lot of support including by EA themselves (NBA Street, sports games, SSX, Lord of the Rings, etc.).
It had Resident Evil exclusivity and other exclusives from Namco, Sega, and Capcom and lots of big multi-plat titles like Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil, 007 Nightfire, Timesplitters 2, Soul Calibur 2, etc.
It didn't get the GTA games or Final Fantasy, but Sony was smart enough to lock those up and had leverage over publishers because they had such a huge headstart on Nintendo/Microsoft (and actually took advantage of it).
It's not the fault of third parties that Nintendo opted to corner themselves into a kiddy reputation with the look of the console and cell-shading Zelda or that Nintendo made some odd choices with their core franchises which led to low hardware sales. That's all on Nintendo. It's not a third parties job to brand and market a console, that's on the hardware maker.
Third parties don't have time for "potential" in today's business, games cost more than ever to make, they have limited resources and have to pick which platforms are going to bring them back the best returns.
Instead of making a balanced, modern console that was easy for third parties to develop their next-gen engines on and taking advantage of a year head start, Nintendo opted to (once again) bet everything on a controller gimmick, only this time it isn't taking off with casuals at all. That's just the law of averages evening out, when you gamble on miracles, eventually you will get burned.
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Sony didn't "lock up" GTA, it was on Xbox too, but not Gamecube.
And third parties lose nothing by adding Wii U while keeping 360 and PS3. Porting isn't expensive.
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Microsoft paid to get it on XBox and it was a good while after the PS2 versions.
It still takes staff resources to port a game, the amount of staff it takes to port 4-5 Wii U EA games could probably be pooled together to work on an original PS4/720 or PS3/360 project, which probably would have a better chance of selling if it breaks out. The amount of staff/money it takes to port one game, not a big deal, but when you're talking porting each iteration of Battlefield + Need for Speed + FIFA + Madden NFL + Tiger Woods + Star Wars, that likely is getting into a pool of about 100+ people that are needed.
EA's franchises on the Wii/Wii U ... really not a good match, the Wii brand is more about casuals and kids, EA relies more on jock gamers (nothing wrong with this) and male teenagers/college kids. That's just their audience, and that type of audience tends to like to Sony/MS' hardware/marketing philosphy better than Nintendo.
Maybe they will port some of the Star Wars games (maybe not the Frostbyte engine ones, but there might be some more family-centric Star Wars games).
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