Can you explain why it is supposedly so difficult to develop games on the Wii U?

[fleischr]

JWeinCom said:
1. The Wii U uses a different architecture than other consoles, and most modern PCs. The Wii U is based on IBM's power pc. It's not necessarily more difficult, but since most third party games run on x86 architecture natively, it means extra work to port.

2. The Wii U has less ram than either of the other two systems. This means textures and such have to be compressed further than they would on other systems.

3. The Wii U is simply less powerful. This means certain effects have to be altered or taken out completely. Probably not for Elliot Quest, but in general...

As for Elliot Quest, it's not a graphically complex game, but it likely has a small budget and a small team, which makes altering the game to run on the Wii U might be challenging. They also didn't say explicitly it was a technical issue. There are also licensing issues and other red tape with the eShop. All of the console shops tend to be more restrictive than Steam.

1. the 360 is power PC based

2. the WiiU has 4x the RAM of the 360

3. Not true. I'll cite NFS: Most Wanted U as a real-life example