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The time for convincing developers and publishers to support the Wii U has long past, claims Bethesda’s VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines.
Speaking to GameTrailers, Hines said Microsoft and Sony had been discussing hardware with developers for a long time and bringing them in on the process to know what to expect.
He said that Nintendo however had not done the same, and suggested rather the firm had just made a console and released it without developer or publisher input.
Hines also reiterated that Bethesda was not looking to release games on Nintendo’s platforms.
“The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long past. The box is out,” said Hines.
“You have to do what Sony and Microsoft has 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 talked to folks like Bethesda and Gearbox and saying, here’s 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 form an experience standpoint, what we thought.
“You have to spend an unbelievable amount of time up front doing that. If you’re going to just decide we’re going to make a box, and this is how it’s going to work 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 got to spend more time trying to reach out to those folks before you even make the box, while you’re still designing it and thinking how it’s going to work.”
Borderlands 2 lead writer Anthony Burch also discussed the difficulties developing for Wii U hardware, particularly given the system was so different from other platforms.
He said that devs were unlikely to change a number of game features and re-configure the control scheme for the Wii U’s unique tablet controller just to release on the console.
“Really it comes down to the hardware,” he said.
“It’s probably not too controversial to say the Wii U is not where the Xbox One and PS4 will be and that’s a lot of development time you’re going to split between a bunch of very different platforms if you’re trying to release on all of them simultaneously.
“That’s really where it comes down to, how similar it is to what you’re doing on the other ones. And we’ve got to strip all of this other stuff out to make it work and we’ve got to completely redo the controls. It’s just not going to happen. “
