BETHESDA VP OF PR: NINTENDO’S time to convince publishers about WII U is LIKE WAY PASSED
Sorry Nintendo Friends. (And listen, I’ll end up buying a Wii U at some point because of Mario Nebula or whatever, so it isn’t like I hate the company.) That huge third-party push that you’ve been waiting for the Wii U to receive is probably never going to happen. According to the VP Czar of Bethesda’s Propaganda Branch, the window during which Nintendo could have convinced publishers to come to their last-next-somewhere generation system has closed.
Nintendo’s window for garnering third-party support of the Wii U has “long passed,” vice president of PR and marketing at Bethesda Pete Hines told GameTrailers.
Speaking in a video in which he answered fan questions, Hines said both Microsoft and Sony developed their next-generation consoles with input from outside developers and publishers. He suggested that Nintendo did not do the same when it was building the Wii U.
“The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long passed,” Hines said. “The box is out.
“You have to do what Sony and Microsoft has been doing with us for a long time,” he added. “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 [sic] and saying, ‘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, 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.”
Hines reiterated that Bethesda is not developing games for Nintendo’s consoles.Borderlands 2 writer Anthony Burch added that developing for the Wii U comes with its own set of difficulties, namely how to utilize the GamePad controler. Burch said developers are unlikely to simply change game mechanics to incorporate the controller’s touchscreen features.
“It’s probably not too controversial to say the Wii U is not where the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 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,” he said. “That’s really where it comes down to, how similar it is to what you’re doing on the other [consoles]. 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.”
[Polygon]