"There are some fleeting parallels between Wii U and the next-gen consoles - the combination of a low-power CPU with a much more powerful graphics chip - but the notion of next-gen titles being easily portable to the Wii U just doesn't work. The gulf in power is just too high, while the GPGPU that we'll see on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 isn't compatible with the older shader model four hardware found in the Wii U." Yeah, we can finally put that to rest fellas. Not saying the Wii U is bad or anything but, face the damn facts.

I'm trying to be strong here but this thread is making me cry.

*hugs Wii U*

It's gonna be okay, buddy. Don't let those bullies get the best of you.

Over the coming weeks people started doing other calculations trying to guess the performance of the machine - don't forget that this is a long time before development kits were available to do actual tests. Some people even built custom PC rigs with under-clocked CPUs to try and gauge performance of their code on these machine. Again, the almost universal answer was that it wasn't going to be powerful enough to run next-gen engines and it might even struggle to do current-gen (PS3 and X360) titles. But in spite of these tests the management made the decision, for various business reasons, to release a game on the Wii U. So now we had to get stuck in and try to make a game.


Damn, now you hear it from a 3rd party.

As a tech guy I have to say I would never have assumed that something like this would ever happen...

Only japanese support techs, bad debugger, bad os, clumsy VS integration, bad compile times... It's like it is their first console...

Hyperbole.

You don't say. It's even more baffling when even Nintendo themselves admitted that making games for their system takes more time than they expected.

Good read

Yeah, I read the article. Very informative and like a splash of cold water in the face. Lots of woah in the Wii U launch period. Hopefully things will improve for third parties and the Wii U in general. There were some positives in the thread as well but this was definitely a wake up call.

"The overall software development took more time than originally anticipated just as we tried to polish the software at the completion phase of development."

Sure, if compiling and debugging takes this long!

I really would like to hear the people at Nintendo who make the hardware-decisions.

I mean, N64 was a good decision going with MIPS but still not easy to program for, in fact it was even very complicated to make really good looking games.

GC was also hard to master but not a PITA to program for. Wii was the same as GC so devs could use all what was there before.

And then this... I mean...  And don't get me started on 3ds' gpu... It seems like they are really chasing the most unknown hardware and say "that's exactly what we want. Let's sign the contracts immediately."