Topic: Games should be on Wii U

Ok, so, I have been running a small indie games company for a year now and I am really confused as to why certain games are not being released on Wii U. The hardest, longest and most expensive part is the actual design and creation of the game. Porting it over to the Wii U as is would be really simple. Just move the map to the game pad and away you go!!

All the recent games released on 360 and PS3 should REALLY be being released on Wii U also. Surly the companies are just missing an extra revenue stream???

Bring us Thief, Final Fantasy 13, Castlevania etc. They will all work, just port them and we will buy them.

Surely, you of all people should know that porting a game over from an Xbox or PS console is not as easy as it sounds. The systems have completely different architectures.

OK, so I know it's not that easy, but it's not as difficult as they are saying either. Even though the sales of the Wii U have not been as high as most people hoped, I fully believe that the cost of porting the game would be considerably smaller than the money they would make from sales. Especially due to the lack of other games to compete against at the moment.

Also many unforseen bugs will appear adding much more time and cost to development. I have seen people try to "easily"port a game to Wii U and it messed up a lot. It took an extra two months to fix it and that could cost a lot. My recommendation, develop for Wii U at the same time as other consoles. It will help uou save time and all it will take is a tester to make sure all systems work well throughout the project

To be honest, if people wanted to play these games, they would already have them, or will pick them up later on their system of choice. It's not as popular as you'll think it is, considering that these will be "lazy" ports, games that don't take advantage of Wii U's unique capabilities and are prone to bugs and glitches.

this begins and ends with Bioshock Infinite

How so?

I want Titan Mario Fall 8-)

That could be Epic

You named 3 games that bomb hard... Do you really need confirmation about how "well" these games would do (especially Thief, which on current gen is horrendously bad) on a system that does not sell 3rd party games well?

The only game that could sell well would be Dark Souls 2, which could actually work on WiiU without that many problems. And maybe Strider

Actually I would love a 3rd person shooter thing in the Mario Universe, does not have to be guns, could be paint balls, a "star launch" (tm), lots of characters for teams, enemies etc..

Imagine battling it out on a Rainbow road landscape. with Pikmin buildings..
.

so how many wii u, xbox, and/or playstation games have you finished? i'm guessing somewhere between zero and none. (after reading through your kickstarter page i see you've made one phone game and are working on a wii u game using unity)

so unity3d is a great engine and i love it a lot. it makes it seem super easy to port a game across multi platforms with the click of a button. but i guarantee you there is much more to it than that. sure for simple games things will generally just work and chances are your debug and testing times won't even be double.

but now think about the games you are talking about being ported. do you think any of them are made with unity? or do you think these companies are big enough and smart enough to make their own custom game engines that are specifically tailored for each game and allow them to squeeze every last drop out of specific hardware. unfortunately, porting a system like that takes a lot more effort. as the game grows, the amount of debug and testing that needs to be done on a separate system grows exponentially, especially the more differences there are in the hardware architecture, not to mention the work it takes to even get it to run in the first place.

you also have to think about the target markets and demographics these games are going for. they have a lot of people working to determine how financially viable all the different aspects are. don't you think that if they thought that the amount of time and money it would take them to port would pay off then they would do it?

it's great that so many indie developers can port their small and medium sized games across without too much trouble and it pays off for them as their games can usually appeal to a wider market, but theres a reason so many big developers don't always make nintendo ports anymore.

because it is one of the only FPS that I could see doing well on Wii U thanks to its constant critical reception and art design

also pointer controls

I discussed the cost-profit issue in a news episode I did regarding Batman: Arkham Knight not coming to Wii U, but I'll try to summarize my points here:

It's not about hardware/power, it's purely about cost-profit. The cost of retooling and porting to the Wii U outweighs the sales that are generally made. Oftentimes, the Wii U versions sell the same or slightly worse than the PC versions, yet the PC versions continue to get versions of popular multi-plat titles. This is because it costs barely anything to get it running on PC, but costs a lot more to get it running on the Wii U (and consoles require optimization to a far greater degree than PCs, since PCs will eventually just brute force their way through it as the tech grows). The chances of making profit on a Wii U multi-plat are next-to-none. That's all there really is to it.

Been over this before. It's not that simple. Ubisoft said it cost them a million just to port it over to Wii U. It's not just push a button and poof there it is.

Otherwise why do we need more of these threads?

I have a 360 and a PS3, so I'm not really concerned about ports from those. I wouldn't mind some ports of PC games, though.

It is profitable to make a port to the Wii U even if it "only" sells 100,000 copies. Of course it's profitable. It's just not profitable "enough". These companies are rapacious in nature. If they're not making a bonanza they lose interest. Unlike indies.

to be honest im actually kind of glad that the kind of stuff that only exists for the sole purpose of making tons of money doesn't always end up on nintendo systems. i like to believe that nintendo fans really know what a great game means.

Having a sale on one console doesn't matter to a publisher if it takes away from the sale of the same game on another console. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that the Wii U version would make a profit: but is it really a profit? If most of the sales on the Wii U were from gamers who also had a different console that also had that game, what would be the point of those sales? All that happened was that they bought the same game on a different system.

I have a hunch that most of the people who want to play AAA 3rd party games also have another system to play those on. With that in mind, what's the point in releasing a Wii U version? Having 100,000 in sales numbers won't matter at all if 95,000 of those could have happened on another console if there wasn't a Wii U version.

While that is true, if the Wii U version sold better than a Xbox or Playstation version it wouldn't matter that those people could have gotten it on another system. The company selling the game would see that they can make money on Wii U and start supporting it more. So if you are purchasing games on Xbox or Playstation over Wii U versions than you are proving to those companies they shouldn't support Wii U. I know it is all weird but that is how it works