uran10 on 07 January 2016
| cycycychris said: Interesting article on the possiblity of her story coming to Wii U. Sam Barlow, creator of the award-winning interactive movie game Her Story, would like to bring his creation to Nintendo’s Wii U, but explains various hurdles involved. It was just last month when Her Story won awards for Best Narrative and Best Performance — with additional nominations for Best Indie Game and Games for Change — during The Game Awards 2015 show in Los Angeles. Currently available on Windows, Mac, and iOS, Her Story leaves it up to the player, an investigator, to solve a murder case in a non-linear FMV (full motion video) format. I caught up with Barlow and asked him if he ever thought about bringing Her Story to a Nintendo platform — it’s a game from a unique genre that’s not currently offered by any Nintendo title, after all. “No … I mean I’d love to, but I’m guessing that the content isn’t a perfect match,” Barlow told me. “Though, the keyboard interface would actually work on a Wii U.” Initially, I never specified what Nintendo platform I was referring to when I asked him. It was more of an open-ended question that could have went in the direction of either Wii U or Nintendo 3DS. “Are you interested in bringing it to Wii U at all,” I asked him. “How much work would be involved?” “I’m a big Nintendo fan, so it’d be nice but there’s the additional expense of ESRB submission/ certification/ etc.,” Barlow told me. “And I’d have to code up a special Wii U set of plugins, so it’s probably not worth the expense!” I asked Barlow how much something like this would cost and he kindly laid out the rough ballpark figures: “Hmm, rough napkin math … I’d need a Wii U/ Unity person to code up the video plugin stuff and test and do anything Wii U specific (as far as I know, the Unity version of [Wii U] isn’t necessarily the latest version). So let’s say three to four months of a good coder … that’s about $15-20 thousand. The certification is about $2 thousand. I’d need a developer’s kit … that’s about $5 thousand. So we’re looking at about $30-40 thousand and that doesn’t account for my time. Let’s say I make $2 per copy sold. I’d need to sell 15-20 thousand copies, which is definitely not guaranteed.” While Barlow clearly expresses interest in having Her Story on Wii U, proper funding and time are seemingly the key factors holding up any progress here. http://nintendonews.com/news/wii-u/her-story-developer-explains-hurdles-wii-u-version/ While I think his estimate is higher than it really would be. He could subtracted 5K off of it right away since Nintendo loans out dev kits free of charge(at least they use too). On unity 5, its beta for Wii U was release in may, so I would think it should be fully supported by now.... No way of me knowing though. Nintendo also pays for all the unity costs. I'm not 100% sure if that is included in his estimates. Still, sounds like the game does need a lot of work to go to any console. I doubt it would also sell 20K. But it refreshing to see a developer just being dead beat honest about the situation and not saying some PR BS. aka "we wrote Xbone and PS4 on a poster and it just seemed to stick" |
Let me correct you right now, they don't loan you them for free, but the price this person said is a lie. You can get a dev kit for 1.5k, much cheeper than what they said that includes unity btw.
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