You see? There is good news after all!

"It's possible. It's work. You have to think about it and put time and craft and effort and whatever else into it but you have to do that for everything that's worth doing in this business... I think people should either go all-in or not bother."

That's not exactly good news. The part about Criterion actually doing that work is awesome, of course, and really makes them look good as developers, but the rest of what he said reminds me of the PS3. How many multi-platform games did we get that weren't fully optimized for the PS3? How many times did the PS3 version suffer despite everyone knowing it could have matched the 360 with more time and effort? Even if the developers wanted to put in that effort, publishers often had no intention of committing more resources than were necessary.

His last line, about developers needing to go all in or not bother, that might be why we're seeing so many on the "not bother" side of the ledger.

It's never easy to port the code from the lead platform. That's what he said.

yeah, i didn't like that quote either. 

I think it's supposed to be easy to develop original content for, but it has different strenghts and weaknesses than the PS3/360.  That means a straight port might end up being a worse game, despite the Wii U having more potential.

A good example is Arkham City, where you can see that they've actually changed minor parts of the game, like that screen shot where some visuals have been removed and others added.  That's definitely not something you see in a simple port.

says a lot doesn't it.

Why they needs to prove Wii U > 360? That's obvious and everybody knows that.

The issue is that Wii U is weak for the next-gen.

The good news is that Criterion is taking the Wii U's unique features seriously. Graphics are only a minor advantage.

The interesting part is this:

"The difference with Wii U was that when we first started out, getting the graphics and GPU to run at an acceptable frame-rate was a real struggle. The hardware was always there, it was always capable. Nintendo gave us a lot of support - support which helps people who are doing cross-platform development actually get the GPU running to the kind of rate we've got it at now. We benefited by not quite being there for launch - we got a lot of that support that wasn't there at day one... the tools, everything."

Seems like they have a more recent dev kit to work with and Nintendo was able to deliver the support required, it's all in the tools and coding.

Here is the DF gameplay video:

See this is what happens when a developer with actual talent puts actual effort into making a graphically advanced Wii U game.