While the PlayStation 2 sold over 150 million consoles, the Dreamcast only sold around 10 million. Still, these figures dwarf the struggling Wii U which hasn’t even hit 4 million. We spoke with Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 producer Kei Masuda on why Konami is not porting their game to the Wii U.
“The Wii U is just not profitable,” explained Masuda, “In fact, we were actually considering a Dreamcast port because it would be profitable. We have teams at Konami that already know the Dreamcast architecture so it would be a lot easier than trying to figure out how to unlock the Wii U’s potential. The audience is definitely bigger on the Dreamcast too.”
“Is there really a point to releasing games on the Wii U?” asked Masuda, “The time it takes to add in features for the second screen would take up too much of our resources. That time could be better spent on other ports. I mean, we could probably get away with porting our games to older systems for years. I don’t see why we don’t do Xbox and PlayStation 1 ports as well.”
Some Wii U developers are also considering moving their projects to the Dreamcast. We spoke with Travis Lang, head of BlueBlitz Studios, on why they might jump ship.
“I’m mostly afraid our game won’t sell on the Wii U,” said Lang, “I’ve been looking at the Dreamcast for a while and it looks to be a viable alternative. The Dreamcast has the VMU thing and that is just as good as the Wii U screen controller. I mean, I would be developing on the system that had Skies of Arcadia and Shenmue. That’s legendary, man. The more I talk about it, the more I’m liking this idea.”
It appears that even the threat of moving games from the Wii U to the Dreamcast is causing Nintendo to panic. It has been rumored that Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has ordered all Nintendo employees to destroy as many Dreamcasts as they can.
