This article is from 2 days ago, so sorry if it's already been posted. [quote][url=http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret-developers-wii-u-the-inside-story][i]The Secret Developers[/i] is Digital Foundry's occasional series where game-makers come forward to talk with us - and you - about topics they are passionate about, or in the case of this article, to give you the inside story behind a particular hot topic. As the future of the Wii U looks uncertain in the face of the successful launches for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4, this "warts and all" tale from a respected third-party creator gives you some idea of how Nintendo handled the transition to the high-definition gaming era, and the challenges developers faced in bringing their games to the Wii U platform.[/url][/quote] [quote][b]The Reveal and Initial Testing[/b] So a basic comparison/calculation makes the Wii U look, on paper at least, significantly slower than an Xbox 360 in terms of raw CPU. This point was raised in the meeting, but the Nintendo representatives dismissed it saying that the "low power consumption was more important to the overall design goals" and that "other CPU features would improve the performance over the raw numbers"... ...Wii U on the other hand seemed to be trying at every turn to make it difficult to compile and run any code. Nintendo had provided an integration of their development tools into Visual Studio - the de facto standard for development - but it didn't work, not even close... ...As a team, we lost days of time to the compile/link/debug overheads and this negatively impacted the amount of features that we could put into our game before the release date.[/quote][quote][b]Developing Games[/b] After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week!... ...Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks... ...The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work.[/quote][quote][b]Online Gaming[/b] At some point in this conversation [b]we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!)[/b] so could we provide more detailed explanations for them? My only thought after this call was that they were struggling - badly - with the networking side as it was far more complicated than they anticipated. They were trying to play catch-up with the rival systems, but without the years of experience to back it up... ...What should have been simple tasks were long-winded and error prone. Simple things like sending a friends request to another user were not supported in the OS, so you had to boot a separate program on the console manually, via a debug menu, so that you could send one. But if any error occurred there was no way to debug why it had failed, it just failed.[/quote][quote][b]Third-Party Support[/b] After the initial flurry of game titles a lot of the studios quietly backed away from their initial statements and announced, with minimal press, that they were in fact not going to make a Wii U version. The reasons behind a particular title not appearing on the Wii U are all pure speculation, but I personally think that a combination of: -Previous development experience using the toolchain and hardware put off development teams from making another title on Wii U. -The technical and feature support from Nintendo were lacking for third-party studios. There was a feeling internally that if you weren't a first-party development studio, you were largely ignored by Nintendo, as we were superficial to their profits. Internally developed titles would save Nintendo and we were just there to add depth to the games catalogue. -The sales figures for the Wii U console were not looking that good soon after launch. There was a lot of confusion in the general population around the launch as most people thought that the Wii U was some kind of add-on to the Wii, they didn't know that it was a new console. This lack of awareness probably contributed to the console not getting off to the start that Nintendo would have hoped and put off studio from developing on the hardware. -Nintendo also fell victim to bad timing. A few months after the console launched the next-gen hype train stepped up a gear as Sony announced the PlayStation 4, with Microsoft joining the fray a few months later. Don't forget that many of the larger studios would have known about the hardware months before it was announced, well before the Wii U hardware actually launched. So, these larger studios had a choice. Would they develop a port of an existing game to a console with limited capabilities and limited market penetration? Or put their teams to work on developing new features and concepts for the "real" next-gen consoles that were going to be launched that year? When you look at it this way, the choice isn't that hard. [/quote]