Topic: Time it took to Nintendo to publish games for Wii U

People always look for reasons why the 3DS is succeeding and the Wii U is not, and it is sad to realize this was all in the hands of Nintendo.

In 2013, Nintendo released for the 3DS:

Fire Emblem: Awakening
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D
Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move
HarmoKnight
Brain Age: Concentration Training
Dillon's Rolling Western: The Last Ranger
LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity

In other words, massive support.

For Wii U, up until Wario & Game and New Super Luigi U, Nintendo has released almost NOTHING.
Ok, they released Lego City Undercover.

Now, why did they do that? Was it the HD development taking time? Why in the long term plans did they decide to have Luigi's Mansion, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, Brain Age, and so on, on 3DS. Why the massive difference in support? And will the upcoming change, change everything?

They thought Nintendo Land will sell the console like Wii sports did with the Wii and that they really didn't need any other games

hmn.....
i think.................................................................................................... there are too many of these fuc**** threads already!

upcoming wii u lineup:

Wind Waker HD
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
Super Mario 3D World
Mario Kart 8
Super Smash Bros.
Pikmin 3
The Wonderful 101
X
A Hat in Time
and lots of other games

so who cares? let's forget about it already and move on

Pretty sure nintendo have stated they looked to outside help in moving to HD and that has led to things being somewhat more delayed, I've no doubt wii u will be well supported 1st party wise but even when 3DS got off to a somewhat slow start I don't remember 3rd parties stating they where taking a wait and see approach like they are with wii u.

To be fair, I think the difference might be that the 3DS was released in 2011 and they've had more time to master the hardware compared to the Wii U hardware. The 3DS started about as slow as the Wii U did, it just caught up when Mario Kart and Mario 3D Land came out later in the year. Like how the Wii U should when Mario 3D World and the like come out later this year.

Nintendo thought that, at launch, giving third party games the limelight while they hold back a bit would help: It didn't do much, in fact some third-parties are being a bit less supportive.
Nintendo thought that word of mouth with a bunch of commercial releases would get some sales rolling: The commercials sucked and it wasn't much visible on T.V. not to mention the name caused confusion to the everyday consumer. The sales was below expectations.
Reason why 3DS is getting more support: smaller and quicker to make games than WiiU. HD consoles take longer time to make games, not to mention the size of the game has to be worth it too.
Will the WiiU recover? If they play their cards right, (a la better advertising, more games) most definitely.

Nintendo underestimated the time it takes to create Wii U games. When we talk about HD development most people think that we are simply talking about a higher resolution, hence they wonder why it is taking so long to make higher-res games (after all Gamecube games were higher res than N64 games and more Wii games could support 480P than Gamecube games and they did not take much longer to develop). However, there is more to modern HD consoles like Wii U than resolution; unlike the Wii, the Wii U uses a programmable shader based graphics card rather than a fixed function one (which was used in Nintendo consoles from the time of N64 to Wii; it should be noted that Xbox 360 and PS3 were also the first consoles to use a programmable shader based system rather than a fixed function graphics card), on a fixed function graphics card the pipelines for graphics functions are pre-determined, whereas a shader based graphics card provides has programmable pipelines. Programmable pipelines on shader based graphics cards are more flexible as they can be programmed to do a larger variety of graphics operations, but this programming itself takes time to learn and get used to; in essence Nintendo has to rewrite many of their tools from the Wii era and create new tools to take full advantage of the enhanced graphical capabilities of Wii U and that will take time to do.

Furthermore, Wii U has a more GPU centric programming approach (according to Nintendo it has a GPGPU which means it has compute shaders most likely for better SIMD support). Now programmers usually have a choice of doing things like SIMD calculation on the CPU (thanks to SSE AVX on X86; and Altivec on PowerPC; and NEON and ARM) or modern GPU (thanks to compute shaders and APIs such as OpenCL and DirectX11 Compute Shader support); most game programmers do SIMD calculations on CPU right now because that is how it has been traditionally done and that is what they are used to (though most are very slowly making the transition). However, on the Wii U, the SIMD units on the CPU (which is not Altivec but a weak SIMD calculator from the Gamecube era known a paired singles) are outdated, hence developers will have to take advantage of the ones on the GPU if they want good performance(which will take time for both Nintendo and 3rd parties to get used to, but it is actually a better solution as SIMD calculation are usually performed more quickly on the GPU).

If all of that is not enough, Nintendo also has to find creative things to do with the Wii U Gamepad and that in itself will extend their development time.

Developing on 3DS is a bit easier at this time because it uses a fixed-function graphics system that Nintendo is familiar with (although the PICA200 does have extensions which can allow some shader like programming to take place but that is limited because the hardware pipelines are in essence fixed functions). Graphically and presentation wise many games do not go far beyond what was done on the Wii. Also, due to the 3DS's architecture developers can easily port and modify existing graphics engines from Wii, DS, and PSP without much hassle. The biggest hurdle in 3DS development I believe is making use of the systems 3D feature (which I believe Nintendo has done at this point).