Fantastic Secret Developer piece from Digital Foundry about the Wii U, and Nintendo's mindset when creating this console. It pretty much sums up what people have been saying how hard it is to port games to this hardware. If you're making games ground up on it, then no problem, but porting even 360/PS3 is tough, and expensive, and unfortunately for Nintendo, the sales aren't high enough for anyone to send the money doing that. Sony went around developers from the start, asking how they could make their console easy to develop games for, but Nintendo just took it around developers at the end and told them what they'd come up with. Even when sending them new development units, they wouldn't give them any indication what had changed from the last one.
It's also interesting that despite Nintendo telling us all this was a machine for the gamers out there, one of their highest priorities was that it was small and quiet so Mom's wouldn't mind having it in the living room. The real shocking bit for me is the part about the online infrastructure. We can all see they're struggling to get their heads around it, but it's surprising just how little effort they seemed to be making in looking at what's already out there.
I'm sure most people will just respond to call this developer lazy, but I thought some people might genuinely be interested in reading it. It might get posted on NLife today as it's a Eurogamer article.
Interesting read. This age of Multi-Plat development is not the pinnacle of what a multi-console games industry can be, it's just being used as a vehicle to make as much money as it can for as long as it can.
This developer doesn't know anything. For the Wii-U to run a PS3/360 game it only requires 30-40% of the Wii-U's power, so thats not an issue. And to port the game, all they need to do is put the game code into a machine, push a button, and in a couple hours it will switch it over to the Wii-U format. Its so easy!
The whole "we don't want to make too much noise for mom" somewhat indicates a smugness that Nintendo thought the Wii casual market had never gone away / would still be there.......
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A run down.......
-Poor communication between Nintendo and third-party developers when it came to trouble shooting or explaining their concerns / questions.
-Sub-par marketing efforts by Nintendo led to consumer confusion and a lack of clarity / hype in the market.
-The Wii U was launched at a time when developers already knew about the next-gen consoles and what they brought to the table….
-……and a understanding that the Wii U lacked the hardware power to successfully port other 8th generation titles on the Xbox One and PS4.
-Underpowered CPU is hard to work with, negating to a degree the fact that the Wii U sits somewhere between the 7th and 8th generations in hardware capability.
-Initial online infrastructure and OS had serious flaws / delays before launch.
-The reaction to the gamepad was generally positive.
I read about on the Wii U Daily forums and Quinton McLeod has this to say I warn you though its pretty lengthy
"This was an interesting read, but toward the end, I took some issue with some of the information presented.
Sorry, but I have to call it... This is BS.
55nm process? No. It's a 45nm process. 10nm makes a pretty big difference.
IBM News room - 2011-06-07 IBM Microprocessors to Power the New Wii U System from Nintendo - United States
He then expects us to believe that CPU in the PS4 is just a 28nm process, except he's only talking about 1 CPU module. Lets not forget that the Jaguar line of CPUs are only quad core. Sony elected to make an 8 core CPU. That makes the CPU much bigger. Not only that, but it's an APU with the full 7870 silicon, thus making it a BEHEMOTH!
The extra 100w (137 watts total) is probably due majorily to the TDP on the GPU itself.
Power Consumption - AMD's Kabini: Jaguar And GCN Come Together In A 15 W APU
Power Consumption - AMD Radeon HD 7870 And 7850 Review: Pitcairn Gets Benchmarked
The Wii U's wattage is 33 watts max.
Wii U blitzes PS3 and 360 as the "greenest" console • Articles • Eurogamer.net
So what does wattage have to do with performance? NOTHING! Nothing at all. Intel is able to squeeze more performance per watt than any of AMD's processors. AMD's FX series of processors are a joke compared to the i7. Not only do they run hotter, but they are less efficient and therefore are much slower. Wattage means absolutely nothing.
Then he says the GPGPU's shader model is incompatible to shader 4.0. Really?
First off, "Shader Model 4" is Direct X. Shader Model 5 is backward compatible to 4.0. There is no Shader Model 6. So, what the hell is he talking about?
Detecting the Shader Model - OpenGL.org
Also, someone on another forum stated that the Wii U does support Shader Model 5.0:
Topic: Seems Wii U is shader model 5.0 after all | HD Warriors
I wouldn't trust a word this guy has to say based on some of the information he's provided. Chances are, this is an EA developer. I have no doubt about it.
This developer doesn't know anything. For the Wii-U to run a PS3/360 game it only requires 30-40% of the Wii-U's power, so thats not an issue. And to port the game, all they need to do is put the game code into a machine, push a button, and in a couple hours it will switch it over to the Wii-U format. Its so easy!
Where my friends and I usually get stupid:
https://www.twitch.tv/MUDWALLHOLLER - Come by hang and visit our Discord. The link for Discord is on the Twitch page.
As speculated by the OP, the story was indeed posted to the main site, so let's all move the discussion to the main site article thread. Thank you! :3
BEST THREAD EVER future of NL >:3
[16:43] James: I should learn these site rules more clearly
[16:44] LztheBlehBird: James doesn't know the rules? For shame!!!
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Topic: Wii U - The Inside Story
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