Not the words Nintendo will want to hear...

The Wii U badly needs third party support — that's a fact that few people will argue about. With the Xbox One and PS4 looming on the horizon, Nintendo is doing its utmost to attract publishers and developers, but Bethesda’s Pete Hines feels that it's too little, too late.

Speaking on GameTrailers' Bonus Round, Hines said:

The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long past. The box is out. You have to do what Sony and Microsoft have been doing with us for a long time and it’s not that every time we met with them we got all the answers we wanted. But they involved us very early on, and talking to folks like Bethesda and Gearbox, they say ‘here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re planning, here’s how we think it’s going to work’ to hear what we thought – from our tech guys and from an experience standpoint.

You have to spend an unbelievable amount of time upfront doing that. If you’re just going sort off deciding ‘we’re going to make a box and this is how it works and you should make games for it.’ Well, no. No is my answer, I’m going to focus on other ones that better support what it is we’re trying to do. So you’ve gotta spend more time trying to reach out to those folks before you even make the box, when you’re still designing and thinking about how it’s going to work.

Bethesda has repeatedly said that it has no plans for the Wii U, but Hines has delivered quite a damning statement regarding the current situation of Nintendo's console. He has a point — with competition being the way it is, you have to involve developers as early as possible if you want an advantage over your rivals. However, do you feel such a comment is slightly arrogant? Surely console manufacturers can't intimately include every third party publisher and developer when they are creating new hardware?

Let us know your thoughts on this situation — and the comments made by Hines — by giving us your opinion below.

[source nintendo-insider.com, via gametrailers.com]