| RolStoppable said:
I wouldn't call it foresight when third parties in general tend to bet against Nintendo, and that includes a clean streak of domination in the handheld market where Nintendo had to earn third party support all over again with the 3DS. And of course the audience interested in multiplatform games wasn't going to buy a Wii U, because the release schedule at E3 2012 already made it clear that it had to be expected that about half of the games will not arrive on the system, not to mention that these expectations had to be lowered the closer we got to the launch of the Wii U. Add bad performance for the launch wave of titles and there's no doubt left anymore that this isn't a system to buy if multiplatform games are what you value the most; not only would you be missing out on most of them, but the ones you do get will be shoddy ports. What do you mean by "they've found success with for the first 4 systems"? What are these four systems? |
Regarding the 3DS, that wasn't anti Nintendo, Devs just weren't interested in the dedicated handheld market. Vita got similar treament, worse from the japanese side and slightly better on the western side due to its specs allowing certain console ports and sony financially pushing projects like COD: Declassified. Besides that I presume people look towards the gamecube which actually had a lot of support.
And you're right, the prospect of third party support was never that great on the Wii U. Part of what I was saying is that its logical to suspect power to be part of that reason. The people who bought third party games on PS3/360 bought into a system with virtue of them being "modern" devices and offering blockbuster experiences. The Wii U specs doesn't fit in line with said audience and the experience they want. I mean Square Enix was happy to announce Dragon Quest X (a wii port) for Wii U but not Tomb Raider. Nintendo produced a system that wasn't part of many devs roadmap and the support it had day one were from the mega publishers EA/Activision/Ubisoft, who don't really have to think to hard about throwing a few mil at a port. For most It didn't fit into their end of gen plans of capitalising off the 160m PS3/360's out in the wild, I'm sure plenty of devs wanted to drop the dated hardware of those platforms but they had a u$erbase to milk.... Whilst at the same time Wii U did not align itself as a future platform to invest in. Its specs were well below the future benchmark 1Tflop+ GPU's and x86 architecture, it was caught between a rock and a hardplace and I believe power is one of the main issues.
The 4 systems are NES/SNES/N64/Gamecube. All very profitable, all modern specs, all moderate third party success. We shouldn't ignore that Nintendo spent around $100 of the WIi U's cost on functionality around the gamepad that could have instead gone into producing a 1Tflop, 4GB RAM system. The difference of their current nature versus the gamecube days, isn't necessarily how much they're spending on hardware, more where that money is going.
