Purple on 12 January 2014
| czecherychestnut said: Very good read, and it does sound quite plausible. Someone mentioned the similarities between the Wii U and the early PS3 with regard to difficulty in programming with immature dev software. One thing to note is that PS3 sales were never as weak as the Wii U, not by a long shot. X360 did outsell it at the beginning (even once the PS3 launched) but PS3 was still doing 8-10 milllion a year. Wii U is doing half that, and hasn't shown much improvement despite the late '13 game releases. The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur. This article here mentions that code brought across from the X360/PS3 doesn't run well on the Wii U because of how weak the CPU is, and that a lot of re-programming is required to try and rebalance the code between the GPU and CPU due to the Wii U being opposite to the PS3/X360. If thats the case, then porting games from the main consoles to the Wii U won't be cheap, and therefore current sales are not sufficient to justify 3rd party developers continuing to develop for Wii U. With the state of the development kits and SDK's provided by Ninty (as documented in this article), it comes as no surprise that a game port that sells 200-300k isn't profitable, nor an exclusive that sells 500k. |
I would ignore those claims by fans, who just feel (fairly) annoyed at the lack of games coming to the system, but take their frustration out on the wrong people. All the evidence you need to show Wii U games aren't economically viable is that the developers aren't making games for the system.
It's just too difficult to make games for. Whether that's due to poor technical support from Nintendo, an underpowered system, a system difficult to code for, poor messaging or just awful sales it doesn't really matter. Nintendo have a duty to make sure any console they make appeals to software devs and they have failed miserably, even with first party developers.
