A lot of politics and I'm sure several NDAs will need to be broken to clear this up.
However, I would say the problem is really down to a combination of slow sales and a serious lack of 1st Party support which makes it difficult for anyone to develop AAA games for Nintendo right now.
I missed these stories, and I'm too lazy to google. Can you post some links to these incidents?
EA bashes Nintendo every chance they get. They have deliberately released games in ways to get people to think negatively about Wii U. Mass Effect 3 is a good example of this. Then next, a senior engineer publicly bashes the console which results in deleted tweets.
EA is an US company, insofar their behaviour is not very unusual. Comparative and derogative advertizing against a non-US company such as Nintendo is pretty "normal". Of course it only works one way.
You know that Sony is a Japanese company right?
Its the Wii U's CPU that's under-powered -- It's three CPU cores are probably around on par with two of the Xbox's three CPU cores in scalar code, but the SIMD is only 64 bits wide (2 floats, vs 4 on other architectures) so suffers through code that's pretty typical in games. Furthermore, the GPU is leaps ahead of the 360 or PS3 in terms of graphics throughput, but its not a modern architecture, so it only has fairly rudimentary support for compute kernels, if any (which would be important offsetting the sub-par SIMD situation).
The trouble this presents for Nintendo is that its fairly straight-forward for a game to tune its graphical fidelity up or down to suit the available hardware, but its much more difficult to make the same game work across very different processing capacities. Within reason you can make things work, or simplify/remove things that go easily unnoticed, but for a current gen console to have (lets be generous) even processing power equipment to last-gen's CPUs, well, there's no way to bring the same experience to Wii U and the PS4 or XBox One -- you either need to pander to the lowest denominator, or you need to cut things out of the Wii U port to the point that its hardly the same game.
The Wii U also has staggeringly less RAM than the other contenders will, which is also a significant stumbling block. Particularly if you look at what we see going on in game design: graphics looks pretty good, we've got the resolution and the shading power we need, but its texture size and animation that are really being pushed. Those things eat RAM alive (a MIP-Mapped texture that's twice as wide and as tall as the alternative consumes 4x the memory). And of course, the would-be-game's data structures, though small by comparison to textures and other art assets, would be roughly the same size across platforms. Accounting for that, you've probably got to go down 2 mip levels on the Wii U vs PS4 or Xbox One, just to fit within memory (or simply look worse, or have some complex texture streaming system that might impact level design, or... any number of things that just don't look as good).
Money.Than explain why crysis 3 was complete for Wii U and not released?
Again, money.What about frostbite not compatible for Wii u but for 360 and ps3 and even mobile?
Again, money.Why FIFA 13 a copy paste of FIFA 12 on Wii?
Me too.I think EA has some beef with Nintendo
didn't know you worked for EA now. Congrats.
I do not :p
The company I worked for did contracting for EA though. NOW I WORK ON [redacted].
Again, money.
Look at sales numebers, FIFA Wii doesn't look like it has many customers. Compare the 0.7M Wii customers to the combined 10.4M on PS3 and X360 (which can share assets).
Would you invest much of your money in something that will only see 0.7M sales, or would you spend it on the 10.4M sales
Doesn't mean u can falsely sell the same product again under a new name. If it wasn't profitable why fool the consumers, dont make it. Period
Please. Nintendo Wii sales have been absolute trash for years and years if you weren't a Nintendo studio doing Nintendo IP. The non-Nintendo games for Wii were little more than charity cases. If anything, I'm surprised it took this long for EA to turn their back.
Again, money.
Look at sales numebers, FIFA Wii doesn't look like it has many customers. Compare the 0.7M Wii customers to the combined 10.4M on PS3 and X360 (which can share assets).
Would you invest much of your money in something that will only see 0.7M sales, or would you spend it on the 10.4M sales
Doesn't mean u can falsely sell the same product again under a new name. If it wasn't profitable why fool the consumers, dont make it. Period
They probably *started* making it on the presumption that initial sales would be higher (e.g. Wii-like), or at least that the adoption trend was steady or growing. What they saw when they were ready to go to manufacturing were lower numbers than they wanted, and declining sales trend. They decided that it was better to just eat their development costs alone, rather than eat their development costs plus the additional costs needed to bring it to market, less sup-par sales revenue. Its just business. The same thing happened with Half Life for the Dreamcast (I've got a more-ore-less complete bootleg that I've played on my DC), and countless others.
And at any rate, for all their problems, its certainly not EA's fault that Nintendo's platform isn't presenting them with viable market opportunity for a particular game or set of games. If the opportunity made business sense, EA would be there in a heartbeat, just like any for-profit entity.
But it doesn't make any sense for them to throw good money after bad.
