Carmack: Nintendo 'owns' Wii software

Doesn't think id software will be making any games for the console.

id Software co-founder John Carmack has all but ruled out making games for the Wii, stating he believes Nintendo "owns" the hardware and the software.

"About twice a year someone brings up doing a Commander Keen title or port, but it's probably not going to be happening," Carmack told Tom's Games. "The Wii is one of those markets where Nintendo owns both the hardware and the software, but part of that is because they make such damn good products. So it's the toughest platform for third party developers."

He continued: "We don't have a software or content base ideally suited for it. So it doesn't really play to our strengths and we're pretty busy with other stuff right now. I'm thrilled that Nintendo has had this kind of success because they took some risky bets, and it's always nice some bold thinking pay off for them. But I don't think we'll be on the platform."

So unless Nintendo comes out with a more powerful console at some time in the future, it looks like Nintendo fans will need to look elsewhere for id Software titles.

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this is why nintendo are doing so well, the products are mostly thier own, i feel ninty will make most money this generaton

I don't think many Wii owners wanted/expected much support from id anyways ...

For nearly a decade you could describe id as a game engine developer, and most of their games are tech-demos of what their engine can do. Now, the Wii is (probably) powerful enough to run the Doom 3 engine, and consumers and developers already know what that engine is capable of, so they have little reason to develop a game for the Wii.

Didn't the original xbox run it doom 3, and I'm assuming with the Doom 3 engine? I'm sure that makes it definite that the WIi could run it as well. I do agree though. I wasn't expecting much from them or a company like epic on the Wii. They basically revolve around high level graphics.

id are similar to epic in that way. they literally live off the rapid progression in graphics technology. I wouldn't read into it too much, they're mainly pc based anyway. their console success's have been muted at best.

Carmack may be partially correct, but this is becoming the standard excuse for developers who decided not to develop for the Wii before it took off.

"It looks like we made a mistake not developing for the Wii, but our game would not have sold anyway."

No, the Wii can't do the same - it's weaker than the original XB... have you seen Far Cry on the box, by the way?

The Wii is far more powerful than the xbox1. The only advantage of the xbox was the hd-resolution.

For example the Wii has the far more powerful powerpc-processor. The xbox1 has only an old pentium processor. The Wii-GPU is without question more powerful than the reduced geforce3 of the xbox1. The main memory bus is faster etc. etc.

Farcry

I think it runs at 30fps.

THe lighting/shadows are impressive for an xbox game I guess, but the low polygon counts and bad textures are far worse than some of wii games.

PC version in comparison

Now lets look at some Wii games.

Now Notice the better Lightin, Shaders, and Higher Polygon Count in Super Mario Galaxy compared to the Xbox version of Farcry. It is even comparable to the PC version. All this at 60fps.

Metroid Prime 3 is another example.

Mostly the same differences.This game also runs at 60fps.

I could go on, but it would be pointless. I could also get into technical details on the hardware about each system, but I don't really wish too, unless you wish me too.

Only very few games did HD on the Xbox. You could also have HD on the Wii, but I guess most developers think it's not worth the performance penalty.

Seriously when does ignorance end? I'm sure it's been posted and discussed so many times. Are you that new to any of the system data? This is so intergral to the GC being more of a raw power proscer than the XBox, check RISC out. Coupled with the fact that GC was built to have no bottle necks the GC could pump out apx 2.5 times the number crunching ability. It's just that A) MS Shaders are easier to use than TEV and B) most developers don't know what the hell TEV is.

As for the Wii, it's built upon GC with increased stats. It's far more powerful. It just suffers from the same lack of knowledge of TEV and knowing what the machine can do. The benifit that GC and Wii had over last gen is that it is RISC and has no bottle necks. 360 I believe no also uses RISC since they switched to a PPC(same as GC/Wii) and have put effort to remove bottle necks. PS3 still has bottle necks, it's just got massive raw computing power.  Theres just so much effiency the GC/Wii have over the last gen that's it's not funny. I just listed RISC and the catchall.

Wii

Processors:

• CPU: PowerPC-based "Broadway" processor, made with a 90 nm SOI CMOS process, reportedly^† clocked at 729 MHz^[76]
• GPU: ATI "Hollywood" GPU made with a 90 nm CMOS process,^[77] reportedly^† clocked at 243 MHz^[76]

Memory:

• 88 MB main memory (24 MB "internal" 1T-SRAM integrated into graphics package, 64 MB "external" GDDR3^[78] SDRAM)
• 3 MB embedded GPU texture memory and framebuffer.

XBox

• CPU: 32-bit 733 MHz Custom Intel Coppermine-based processor in a Micro-PGA2 package. 180 nm process.^[12]
  • SSE floating point SIMD. 4 single-precision floating point numbers per clock cycle.
  • MMX integer SIMD.
  • 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front side bus to GPU.
  • 32 KB L1 cache. 128 KB on-die L2 "Advanced Transfer Cache".
• Shared memory subsystem
  • 64 MB DDR SDRAM at 200 MHz; 6.4 GB/s
  • Supplied by Hynix or Samsung depending on manufacture date and location.
• GPU and system chipset: 233 MHz "NV2A" ASIC. Co-developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
  • Geometry engine: 115 million vertices/second, 125 million particles/second (peak)
  • 4 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units each
  • 932 megapixels/second (233 MHz x 4 pipelines), 1,864 megatexels/second (932 MP x 2 texture units) (peak)
    • Peak triangle performance (32pixel divided from filrate): 29,125,000 32-pixel triangles/sec raw or w. 2 textures and lit.
      • 485,416 triangles per frame at 60fps
      • 970,833 triangles per frame at 30fps
  • 4 textures per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing (NV Quincunx, supersampling, multisampling)
  • Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
  • Similar to the GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 PC GPUs.

Anyways I'm not a big fan of Id games anyways. I'm just not a big FPS fan at all.