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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

Sharu said:
Funny that all this 'developers' who trash wiiu always stand anonimous. Seems that industry still afraid of Nintendo Ninjas.


Did you even read the article? It is far from trashing.



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czecherychestnut said:
Very good read, and it does sound quite plausible. Someone mentioned the similarities between the Wii U and the early PS3 with regard to difficulty in programming with immature dev software. One thing to note is that PS3 sales were never as weak as the Wii U, not by a long shot. X360 did outsell it at the beginning (even once the PS3 launched) but PS3 was still doing 8-10 milllion a year. Wii U is doing half that, and hasn't shown much improvement despite the late '13 game releases.

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

This article here mentions that code brought across from the X360/PS3 doesn't run well on the Wii U because of how weak the CPU is, and that a lot of re-programming is required to try and rebalance the code between the GPU and CPU due to the Wii U being opposite to the PS3/X360. If thats the case, then porting games from the main consoles to the Wii U won't be cheap, and therefore current sales are not sufficient to justify 3rd party developers continuing to develop for Wii U. With the state of the development kits and SDK's provided by Ninty (as documented in this article), it comes as no surprise that a game port that sells 200-300k isn't profitable, nor an exclusive that sells 500k.

I would ignore those claims by fans, who just feel (fairly) annoyed at the lack of games coming to the system, but take their frustration out on the wrong people. All the evidence you need to show Wii U games aren't economically viable is that the developers aren't making games for the system.

It's just too difficult to make games for. Whether that's due to poor technical support from Nintendo, an underpowered system, a system difficult to code for, poor messaging or just awful sales it doesn't really matter. Nintendo have a duty to make sure any console they make appeals to software devs and they have failed miserably, even with first party developers.



Purple said:
czecherychestnut said:
Very good read, and it does sound quite plausible. Someone mentioned the similarities between the Wii U and the early PS3 with regard to difficulty in programming with immature dev software. One thing to note is that PS3 sales were never as weak as the Wii U, not by a long shot. X360 did outsell it at the beginning (even once the PS3 launched) but PS3 was still doing 8-10 milllion a year. Wii U is doing half that, and hasn't shown much improvement despite the late '13 game releases.

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

This article here mentions that code brought across from the X360/PS3 doesn't run well on the Wii U because of how weak the CPU is, and that a lot of re-programming is required to try and rebalance the code between the GPU and CPU due to the Wii U being opposite to the PS3/X360. If thats the case, then porting games from the main consoles to the Wii U won't be cheap, and therefore current sales are not sufficient to justify 3rd party developers continuing to develop for Wii U. With the state of the development kits and SDK's provided by Ninty (as documented in this article), it comes as no surprise that a game port that sells 200-300k isn't profitable, nor an exclusive that sells 500k.

I would ignore those claims by fans, who just feel (fairly) annoyed at the lack of games coming to the system, but take their frustration out on the wrong people. All the evidence you need to show Wii U games aren't economically viable is that the developers aren't making games for the system.

It's just too difficult to make games for. Whether that's due to poor technical support from Nintendo, an underpowered system, a system difficult to code for, poor messaging or just awful sales it doesn't really matter. Nintendo have a duty to make sure any console they make appeals to software devs and they have failed miserably, even with first party developers.

What a load of BS. Face this to your anonymous source and the just stop it with the BS.

http://wiiudaily.com/2012/10/darksiders-2-dev-wii-u-is-easy-to-develop-for/



rik said:
Is it just me who thinks what a load off bs? I mean come on anyone could have wrote that surely?


Exactly. Aprils fool in January?



czecherychestnut said:

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

Criterion have said it was very easy to upgrade the Wii U version of Need for Speed to use PC level textures. If other devs fail to do this, they're clearly lazy.



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supernihilist said:

What a load of BS. Face this to your anonymous source and the just stop it with the BS.

http://wiiudaily.com/2012/10/darksiders-2-dev-wii-u-is-easy-to-develop-for/

I don't think that's the definitive evidence you hope it is. The Wii U version was an inferior port to the PS360 versions, which correlates very much with what the anonymus dev is saying.

Vigil Games saying some nice things about the Wii U prior to release of the game is hardly surprising as they're trying to sell a product. They're not exactly going to admit they had huge trouble making the Wii U version reach parity are they?

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-darksiders-2-on-wii-u-face-off



Purple said:
supernihilist said:

What a load of BS. Face this to your anonymous source and the just stop it with the BS.

http://wiiudaily.com/2012/10/darksiders-2-dev-wii-u-is-easy-to-develop-for/

I don't think that's the definitive evidence you hope it is. The Wii U version was an inferior port to the PS360 versions, which correlates very much with what the anonymus dev is saying.

Vigil Games saying some nice things about the Wii U prior to release of the game is hardly surprising as they're trying to sell a product. They're not exactly going to admit they had huge trouble making the Wii U version reach parity are they?

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-darksiders-2-on-wii-u-face-off


i see thst and...voila

http://nintendoenthusiast.com/news/harder-develop-games-wii-u-case-says-renegade-kid/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Developing-for-Nintendo-Wii-U-Is-Surprisingly-Easy-Developer-Says-288608.shtml

http://n4g.com/news/1307326/miyamoto-wii-u-is-even-easier-than-previous-consoles-to-develop-for

 

Many devs have said that the difficulties of WIiU are the ways and extra work and money required to implement the Gamepad, Miiverse etc. features. Nothing to do with the HW itself ....well yeah but not the chipset



Anybody could have picked out the nuances that peeved them and made a big deal about them.. The linker took long to load, the online was finished at the end.  The debugger was a pain.  Japanese translators.. Sounds like complaining.   Some ppl do good work with a launch kit, others blame anonymously.    



curl-6 said:
czecherychestnut said:

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

Criterion have said it was very easy to upgrade the Wii U version of Need for Speed to use PC level textures. If other devs fail to do this, they're clearly lazy.


Well, it totally depends on the existing code and engine, I guess. Code doesn't equal other code in any way. If your code automatically "pleases" the Wii U architecture cpu-wise then of course you can easily utilize the better GPU it has.



snyps said:
Anybody could have picked out the nuances that peeved them and made a big deal about them.. The linker took long to load, the online was finished at the end.  The debugger was a pain.  Japanese translators.. Sounds like complaining.   Some ppl do good work with a launch kit, others blame anonymously.    


Who says they didn't do good work? But it's the tools that prevented perhaps more of a good work. And this applies to all devs if BigN ships the same software to every studio.