Bethesda/Gearbox point out why they don't support Wii U

[InsaneZucchini]

It still sounds like they're just not willing to put forth the effort to make it happen. Understandably fears could arise as there are monetary risks to it as far as providing the necessary resources are concerned, but Bethesda has little to base those fears on. They don't know how poor their games would sell on Nintendo's systems because they haven't developed one for a Nintendo home console in 22 years, they don't have much to reference.

- It makes sense that Sony and Microsoft would consult third parties on how to build their systems. Their systems thrive on third parties. Most of the software sales for their systems are third party so it's necessary to ensure the architecture evolves in a direction they can easily work with. This also explains why the two systems have wound up using such similar architectures.

Nintendo makes and lives on their own games, so prioritizing the architecture for their needs makes sense too. If third party support fell through they'd have developed the system in a way that may make it more difficult for them or is unnecessarily costly.

-This falls in line with the first point. And the issue makes some sense, if they're scared they'll fail to turn a profit they're not going to be willing to put forth the resources to optimize their games for the system. With the PS4 and Xbox One it's easy because they're essentially making the game for one system as opposed to two due to the similarities between them. And so that ties in with point three about the audience. However...

-ZombiU is the third highest selling game on the Wii U so far, that's not a game that falls in line with Nintendo's perceived audience The Audience argument always confounds me, if the audience isn't there it's because it's not being provided, not because there aren't people interested. Resident Evil, RE Zero, and RE 4 are not "Nintendo's audience" but all sold quite well considering the total number of Gamecubes sold, each in the top 20 best selling games for the system even. The Metroid Prime Trilogy doesn't even fall in line with their so called target audience and it's one of their major IPs. There is definitely an Action/Adventure and RPG audience on Nintendo's systems Bethesda has no excuse there. Gearbox's concern makes a bit more sense considering the lack of many quality shooters that have shown up on Nintendo's systems to date. You wouldn't expect there to have been many sales of that kind as a result.

-In my experience (Mass Effect 3, Assassin's Creed 3, Injustice Gods Among Us) Wii U's online is, overall, as good as what I've seen on Xbox 360 and PS3. It is just lacking in support, games to make use of it, an install base to provide enough people to play with, and the attention to provide updates to fix any bugs that pop-up.