I think the big problem is that, from the bdginning, Nintendo always makes their consoles for the games they want to make--third parties be damned. Sometimes they acknowledge third party needs (ie: Pro Controller) but it always seems like an afterthought. Not sure if it's possible to thrive without 3rd party support these days.

Yeah, some of Nintendo's ideas may actually be good. I appreciate the low energy consumption, small foot print, lower dev costs, etc and their money making model seems pretty sound. It's just harder to compete when you have companies like M$ and Sony willing to throw everything including the kitchen sink and are willing to risk money to do it (but recoup the money in other ways) AND have the power that 3rd parties crave.

It's really hard to blame 3rd parties after hearing stuff like that. 0 effort from Nintendo's part.

I hope theyre well into development of their 9th gen console. The Wii U will have an ok run due to zelda and mario but still....

Sad story indeed. Hearing devs complain about ridiculous details making excuses not to develop for a console...hard stuff

Nah. It's people like you being in denial no matter what that is the sad part.

Some interesting excerpts:

"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."

"The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work...The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360"

"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."

Sounds like exactly what I and others have been saying for over a year now; an eccentric design that isn't fully utilised by quick and nasty PS3/360 ports due to its different architecture.

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.

I wonder if this is a Darksider's dev, not sure if any company with an ongoing relationship with Nintendo would be so forthcoming with criticism.

I don't buy that it was Criterion though as it clearly sounds like they were working on a launch game.

Still nintendo fans think it's a conspiracy and it's everyone elses fault...Nintendo has themself to blame for their position, just like sony had themself to blame for the ps3 launch mishaps.

And what many others said: It's not worth it. It is ok to select only "interesting" parts but the development situation is a MESS, obviously, and Nintendo is to blame.

I think this comment sums it up nicely on that site:

Sunjammer1 hour ago