Can anything 'save' the Wii U?

[Norris2k]

Mr Khan said:

Norris2k said:

I agree with all (especially 4 that would give them more games, and more focus on main and new IPs) but number 1. Are they even trying, to be so unsuccessful with 3rd party ? What I heard is that their development kit are not on par with Sony/MS and that the documentation suck. How much did they lowered their license fee that were the highest before the PS1 ? Do they offer money and support like everyone else ?

I mean some studios had such a great relationship with Sony they offered themselves to be bought. The very little I heard from Nintendo is that F-Zero GX was not good for Miyamoto, that they don't need rare anymore, and I read something about the Argonaut Games studio (the first starfox) boss complaining how much their relationship with Nintendo had been disappointed (used and thrown away).

I could be wrong, but it's hard to think that with their massive money and massive Wii success, they fought to get 3rd party, but it failed all because of 3rd party attitude.

It's clear that they can't even get third parties to give them the time of day in the first place, like the debacle with EA where unprecedented partnership turned into the console treated worst by EA since the damn Dreamcast, and all happened before the console even landed. So it's not like "we tried, but ran into problems because Nintendo's a bad partner to work with," it's more "we refused to try." Now, they may have had good reasons for doing so, and i'm suppressing my innate bias against the major third parties in this, but my point is that trying isn't worth it for Nintendo, which might not be third parties' fault, and might not be Nintendo's fault, just that we're past the point where rebuilding the relationship is worth it for Nintendo.

My guess is that the only way Nintendo could have gotten worthwhile third party support would have been with an x86 machine with 8 GB of RAM: do what the competition has done, as close as possible. This would not be worth it to Nintendo, so don't bother.

Yes, the hardware is something I forgot to talk about. Different and weaker is not the best that can be done to attract developpers. I don't think it would be a mistake to go more toward standards than continuing with their strange obsession for power consumption and console size. I mean just for the Wii U, it's close to the PS360, so they went for some kind of standard here, but the architecture is different enough with a very weak CPU and a better GPU to require investment for port. A 360 like with more memory would have been great in term of potential port. And as for EA (which is not exactly a company I like), we don't know what kind of support they got.

But you are right it could be past the point they can rebuild anything. It could also be entirely the 3rd party "fault" (in the sense they don't think Nintendo console are worth a try, whatever Nintendo do). Still, my point is that I still feel it's worth a try, given it seems they can improve easily on some points, and that this is a weakness they have.