I no longer regard The Witness as an indie game now that Johnathan Blow is in bed with Sony.

Looks like Myst, i.e. I don't care about the game anyway.

Executive decision would have been "Oh look, we can get a PC game running on PS4 with little to no extra effort..."

Less about the WiiUs capabilities and more about a lazy developer..

So the game won't be watered down by teh Wii Uz? Heck yea day one!

All jokes aside I'm surprised 'it can't be done' on Wii U. I will have to see more of this game to be convinced it can't. That first trailer wasn't enough to convince me to make a purchase either.

No, he never said it would come to iPhone or anything else.  He simply said that the contract with Sony doesn't cover iOS or PC.  "This exclusivity does not prevent us from being on the PC or iOS at launch, for example."

As of now, it's coming to nothing else.  I'm sure it will, but nothing else has been announced.  It's a small developerment studio, they only work on one version of anything at a time.  As he said, being exclusive to PS4 would actually have been the case, regardless, as another console version would never have been ready before the contract was over, anyway.

So, I'm guessing PC is next.  That would make the most sense.

Also, the game is flat-out gorgeous, I'm not sure why people are saying it's not.  The swamps and trees are beautiful.  As for the Wii U, I bet they haven't really looked into it.  I don't think a big deal should be made over this.  It's just not in the picture right now.

The game was first announced in 2009 for Windows and iOS. I followed the development blog from the very beginning. The guy is awesome!

It looks like the press is all mixed up, then.

"Of course, this isn't an announcement that The Witness will appear on PC, iOS, or any other console; Blow is just clarifying when that would be a possibility. The release date and non-PS4 platforms for The Witness have yet to be announced, but we'll surely hear more about the puzzle game as we get closer to the console's holiday 2013 release."  http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122327-Jonathan-Blow-Clarifies-The-Witness-PS4-Exclusivity

You can tell they're an indie studio by the poor job they're doing with communication.

Credit to Naninho for the link, but there is some interesting stuff on The Witness dev blog. http://the-witness.net/news/2013/02/a-clarification-about-our-ps4-exclusivity/#more-2091

"Jonathan Blow
Posted February 22, 2013 at 2:19 pm | Permalink

The situations are just different. iOS users expect their devices to be low-spec machines compared to big computers, so if you deliver them a game that does not look as good as the PC version, that is totally fine.

360/PS3 users have a different expectation (or at least they did, prior to next-gen consoles being announced). If you deliver them something that does not look really good, it will be looked upon badly. But for a small team to make a 3D game look competitive on those platforms requires a lot more work than we have to spare.

Also: as I have commented here before, to be on iOS we just have to do one hard thing: port successfully to a low-spec machine. To be on the 360 or PS3, we have to do two hard things: port to the machine *and* pass through an arduous cert process that, depending on particulars, may also interfere with the game and its aesthetics in a way we don’t really want to do.

On the PS4, we’ve removed the low-spec pain, so we are once again down to one hard thing, approximately. (Well the port is not trivial in this case either, but we know when we do it that we will get a good-fidelity version of the game at the end, so we like it more.)"

"Jonathan Blow
Posted February 22, 2013 at 5:41 pm | Permalink

We just have to see. Once we have done iOS, a Wii U port would be somewhat easier… we just need to see if enough people own the console and are buying games on it at that time."

"Jonathan Blow
Posted February 22, 2013 at 5:45 pm | Permalink

I wrote everything I said on stage. I pre-submitted it to Sony so that they could get the show set up, but they expressed no desire to edit it.

There was a prompter, but I just glanced at it a few times, so I wasn’t really speaking from it. A short speech like that is not hard to remember.

About the cert and patching process, I only know as much as anyone else knows: Sony has made remarks that they want this to be better. In an interview from a couple of days ago, the official statement was made that they want cert/gatekeeping to be somewhere between PS3 and iOS. That is a pretty wide range, so who knows where it will end up. I would not expect them to go totally open/uncurated, though."

So Wii U can run Watch Dogs but not this game? Something's not right about this guy.

a small developer talking big over the 30 years old Nintendo, one of the best developers in the world, if not the best. I bet Pikmin3 will look better and more demanding than this game.