I don't understand some of the logic in here that somehow the Eurogamer article is wrong because a few small developers can write perfectly fine on the Wii U.

 

That doesn't prove the developer was lazy or incompetent, it proves what we already knew - that it CAN be done but it costs too much time and money to be worthwhile if your game is also releasing on other much easier to write on platforms.

 

The Wii U is not a BAD platform to develop on, that is clear, but its certainly not as easy as the competition.  When you consider that even the Xbox One and PS4 now have an equal or larger install base than Wii U (and the code can easily be ported between those platforms as they are similar), its a no-brainer than the Wii U is just not third-party developer friendly, unless you are willing to commit a lot of resources to that single platform.

 

As many have said already, Nintendo thought they could capitalise on the popularity of the Wii and blew it. 

 

Is the Wii U a failure?  I don't think so, just as I never felt the Gamecube was a failure (and Nintendo certainly didn't, they made a profit on it).  But from a multi-platform developers point of view it is and that doesn't mean they are wrong, because the most important thing for them it for the platform to be profitable and its pretty clear the Wii U so far is not, for them.

 

I have said it before, based on the Wii I always expected the Wii U to be a platform only really worth buying exclusives on, I always intended to get a PS4 or One for multi platform titles.  The problem is that Nintendo promoted it otherwise and clearly did not support the port teams well enough to achieve that goal and then delayed their own titles so much that many of us felt ripped off.

Perhaps they didn't word it exactly like that but I felt they made it fairly clear they were talking relative to other platforms.  I guess its difficult to judge how other people would interpret it.

Yet companies like eurogamer say otherwise.

No, they said that when trying to PORT a game that is completely optimised for Xbox 360/PS3 to Wii U, its hard and expensive.

Its unlikely small indie devs ever pushed those consoles that hard, its certainly unlikely they heavily optimised the engine.

As an example, it should be very easy to port between ALL platforms when using Unity, as the engine developers did the most important work of optimising for each platform. However if your game heavily modified the engine or was optimised for specific consoles over the past 7 years, its going to be very very hard to port to Wii U.

The question is not "is the Wii U more powerful than Xbox 360/PS3" because the answer is clearly yes. The question is can your game be ported to Wii U and actually take advantage of its unique architecture so you are actually tapping that power, in a cost effective manner. So logically for small indie projects the answer is more likely to be yes than for the big developers like the Eurogamer articles are clearly from.

Bottom line, PS4/Xbox One are enough of a jump forwards to temporarily offset the problem of optimisation. Combine that with the fact many games are also ported to PC anyway, so they already have a version of the engine partially optimised for PS4/Xbox One hardware. Even if they don't, they have the PS4, Xbox One AND PC market that benefit from doing so, making it cost effective. The fact that optimising for Wii U benefits ONLY Wii U, is by far its biggest stumbling block and is what those big developers are moaning about.

Consoles don't work like that. If you load a game faster one of two things happen:
1. the game plays at a higher speed. (2 second becomes 1 etc.)
2. the data stays in memory and does nothing for gameplay.

I made this in response to that kid what wants to be a developer and always says wii u sucks and sold his wii u but buys games for it all the time to say how bad they are, he made a thread saying something like wii u should have usb3 in an update to hardware or software or something.

 

1. That doesn't make sense, you are talking about executing the code quicker not loading quicker. 

2. Consoles are still just computers, the quicker the data get into RAM the less time you spend staring at loading screens and the less texture/object pop-in you get.

 

The problem is the WiiU (like the PS3) seems to have some other bottleneck that slows down loading so it never reaches the speed of the media itself, most likely its the DRM.

 

So yes USB 3.0 would be pointless on the WiiU, but its far from pointless in other cases.

I read it. Sounds like someone's butthurt over Nintendo not doing his job for him.

 

I disagree, its clear that Nintendo screwed up.  No way a developer should have been struggling to get a simple "Hello World" to run on a new console and if the debugger has issues, how exactly do you expect the developer to do their job?  Having to GUESS that the network code would work okay because you couldn't run it on proper debugging mode, seriously?

 

It sounded clear to me that Nintendo made it almost impossible for them to do their job and the end results makes it seem totally plausible.  Its perfectly understandable that with a poor experience like that, no developer is going to give it a second chance.

 

I mean come on, the sheer fact that the WiiU OS is still such a slow laggy mess should be a clue.  Sony aren't exactly fantastic when it comes to OS coding but the improvements between PS3 and PS4 are huge, its finally is up to Xbox 360 quality of experience (when ironically the Xbox One seems WORSE).  In comparison the WiiU OS experience is just a joke.  If the end user experience is poor, I can only imagine how bad the underlying code must be.

 

I am still very much looking forward to Mario Kart and Zelda, but that's not going to make me say the WiiU is something its not.  The only thing I can really say that is positive about the WiiU OS is that the backwards compatibility is fantastic.  Although that said, they could easily have made it compatible all the way back to Gamecube and I wouldn't have to go out and buy a Classic Controller to play N64 games.  So even there, its not perfect.

yes i know, but they don't need to have TVii or whatever it's called, all they need is a app.

 

You still seem to be missing the point of TVii, that you only need to perform a single search to obtain results from ALL the services you have. 

 

So if you searched for Doctor Who it would tell you which episodes are available on iPlayer, Netflix and Lovefilm.  Even though I never use Netflix on WiiU due to the lack of surround sound support, I would use this.

USB 2 is faster than any disc drive currently available.

 

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.  If the Wii U actually utilised it properly then it totally would be worth it.  Who wouldn't want the Wii U loading games as fast as PC?

 

As it stands I could argue the same that more than 20Mbit broadband is pointless, purely based on the fact the Wii U refuses to download that fast.  It doesn't mean its pointless overall, its just pointless due to how the Wii U is poorly optimised.

I think saying that basing a console on PC hardware is being "lazy" is very narrow minded.

 

The point is that costs have been constantly going up and if developers say they need thing to be easier you would be a fool to ignore them.

 

You also make it sound like neither Sony or Microsoft did any customisation at all which is not true.  They did exactly what Nintendo did, started with off-the-shelf designs and revised them accordingly.  The PS4 has a custom network processor and DSP, the Xbox One also has a custom DSP although arguably sticks much closer to the PC design - but as the company who makes Windows that is hardly surprising.

 

Consoles were custom because they had to be, PCs were very inefficient and this has slowly improved.  Nintendo stick with custom because it means exclusive titles have a huge advantage, but that is also why their key titles have taken so long to come out on Wii U.  Its also really annoyed the third-parties which is hardly a logical business decision.

 

So if anything, I would say its Nintendo that are shooting themselves in the foot here stubbornly refusing to change with the times.