| cannonballZ said: I'm pretty sure this was in the beginning of the Wii U's life cycle, 1 yr into it, the devs that do stick to it will surely have improved in developing for it. The next wave of games will be all the proof we need in that department. Problem with that is, it's not going to be easy getting some 3rd parties back on board even with improved console sales. |
That's the hopeful side of this. A lot of the issues the developer talked about can and should be worked out. The question is, how far will Nintendo go? Will they really attempt to fix everything for the sake of third party developers? Logic would say yes but Nintendo's history would say maybe. My guess is that they'll get things fixed up to a state where their internal development teams are content, then let the rest go. That means that they might never improve the process where developers have to wait a week for replies from Japan, for example.
However, I'm sure Nintendo will get a lot of the development environments and processes improved over time. The real problem is going to be getting publishers to come back for another attempt--and the problem with that is that Nintendo doesn't usually try all that hard in terms of third-party relationships. Sony basically begged for continued PS3 support and assembled dedicated tech teams to assist developers. Nintendo probably won't.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that next gen games are going to get more and more hardware intensive over time, which means that, eventually, ports might not even be able to run on the Wii U without drastic cut-backs. We'll have to see about that.
The really troubling thing for me is that Nintendo isn't paying attention to what Sony and Microsoft are doing with Live and PSN. That is completely unacceptable and a disservice to their customers. Always pay attention to industry improvements or you'll find yourself scrambling to catch up.
