News EA could skip Wii U with next gen titles

did u just say the next round of consoles is equal to PC's?

hahahahahaha

 

I think perhaps there is a mixture of reasons with EAs decision here, so it's probably not as clear cut as people are suggesting.

Yes Wii U sales are disappointing for Nintendo which could well have influenced EAs direction. However, if you are looking at the figures (from this article) they don't seem to be all that bad - 3.45 million units to date. I assume the last financial period will be first quarter 2013, plus maybe December 2012 to make it 1/3 of the year, we are still looking at around 10million units at the end of the first year - depending on if the price cuts make any difference, and that would be only up to December 2013 so before the last minute Christmas rush.

Considering the PS3 has sold around 70 million over its life so far, that not all that bad, and should still give a good return for a developer for the life of a console.

So it could be that the Wii U is a little difficult to develop for (not sure how that stands up considering the base technology - it's not a Cell CPU after all, and that didn't actually stop developers, it just got them complaining about it).

It's more likely EA have listened to the hype around low sales and decided to put it on hold then - as mentioned above - derided the console to try to stop potential sales loss from the platforms they are supporting.

 

next gen consoles are better than 80%+ of all pc`s sold last year.

 

Well the true reasons are hardly ever clear cut, so I won't bother trying to make any assumptions as to why they made this decision.

However, I will make a point about my own disappointment with Nintendo. They've basically destroyed interest within the more "hardcore" gaming populous with the Wii. Sadly, these people are the kind likely to be early adopters. Hell I got a Wii, I'm not even remotely interested in a Wii-U, and I don't know a single person who is.

I was simply so disappointed with almost every Wii game I played bar Super Mario Galaxies; that was a lot of fun and did a lot right. I have yet to complete Skyward Sword, and probably never will, thought it was abysmal. Mariokart was fun, but without any support after, it can only go so far, the gimped split screen multiplayer options didn't help either. Smash bros brawl was again okay, but not as good as Melee. They didn't balance the characters at all well, which is okay at first, but after you've been playing with friends for a while, it becomes terribly limiting. We shouldn't have to ban the use of individual characters because they're simply overpowered, not fun in the long run.

Nintendo just stopped caring, and I wouldn't be so bothered with that, except all their decent games are first party. I eventually got sick of the silly controller and just used the GameCube one, which rendered the games that heavily used the motion one a bit useless.

I just hate having compulsory gimmicks. The Kinnect is a good example of something done right here. I practically never use one for games, and I don't know somebody who does. But the majority of games don't depend on it, so I don't mind. At the same time, it's handy for some things and works well enough to be a bit of fun.

Another issue I have, is that most of the big Nintendo games only rely on good gameplay. They don't bother with graphical immersion or gripping stories. The problem here is that when one of those games fails in the gameplay department, there's just nothing left to enjoy. I've just lost all my faith in Nintendo, I'd like to get it back, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

 

They are arrogant enough to think they can get way with not selling on steam, so I wouldn't put it below them to think they can get away with not supporting Nintendo products.

 

EA choice in the end of the day. They may reverse it they may not. Only thing it really alters is if you play ea published games then they won't be on the wii u at the moment.

EA publish so many games its a big old list to exclude yourself from so may affect purchase decisions.

 

Come on man he's not being that silly! He's saying the SNES/Mega Drive/TurboGrafx/Neo Geo are equal to PCs!

EDIT: OK I do feel like a bit of a nob but I'm a bit of a generation nazi, remember we're in the eight generation of consoles now people.

 

I work in film, and this is a horrible, horrible fallacy on your part. Most are filmed at 4K. Some are even starting to be filmed more regularly at 8K (especially anything IMAX related). The difference is that the final product is likely to be scaled down to 2K, with a few being released at 4K. The reason for this is that they end up shooting a little extra footage around the main shot in case they decide later in editing that they want to zoom in/out, pan, etc from the original shot. As well, the VFX work is done on the 4K plates (raw footage) then when everything is rendered out it gets saved to the desired size.

 

Its not that they were arrogant, it just didn't make financial sense. For indie devs and smaller studios, its ideal as they don't sell as many copies as EA or the number of different games, but with the number of units EA ships, the cut valve takes would be too high.

With origin, they get much more control, and get to take 100% of the price.

 

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/crytek-explains-why-crysis-3-wii-u-had-to-die-6404763

Crysis 3 was ready to go - yet EA killed it

 

In addition to what fdbh96 said, it's not a real comparison. Origin has been a big success for EA. Wii U wouldn't be. People want to believe that all big companies are arrogant, evil, greedy, spiteful and vindictive. That is just internet noise/class-warfare BS. Companies like EA make decisions based on whether or not something is financially viable. There is no way EA would actively choose to ignore a Nintendo console with their AAA content just because they wanna be dicks. There aren't enough Wii U consoles sitting under the TV in peoples' homes, and people who CARE about buying AAA games KNOW ENOUGH to get them on the premium consoles where they will have the best experience.

It just doesn't make any sense for EA to get FB3 up and running on Wii U.

What we don't know is the level of quality that port was at. We can only assume that EA decided spending millions on manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and support was not worth the investment. IMO that's more Nintendo's fault than EAs. Nintendo needs to sell more Wii Us before publishers are willing to put that much investment into it.

 

Either way EA can't win:
1. They release a game thats not ready/fully compatible and people complain.

2. They don't release the game and everyone moans.

 

Off topic on topic goodness:
Since the April update, WiiU users noticed a bump in performance in games.
This raised a nice rumor that the WiiU has been overclocked.. or more like put to normal speed. There is no denying that Nintendo has big tendency to underclock their CPU and GPU on their console to reduce heat, and noise. The WiiU does come with a 75W PSU, but the console doesn't consume near that much under max load.

So the rumor, to take at a grain of salt.. and I mean GRAIN OF SALT. Like this is very unlikely:
- Nintendo set the CPU clock to 3.24GHz and the GPU to 800MHz compared to 550MHz

Nintendo never speaks about hardware specs, so we have no idea if anything of it is right.

 

I saw that earlier, it's possible they could have underclocked But that jump is quite large I don't see it being that large if it happens at all, perhaps the guy who found out the normal clock speed could see if it's true,

 

OR, the guy that figured our the clock of the CPU originally, his method was wrong. No one tested his findings.

But yes I agree with you, the clock increase can't be this big.

 

Could be that their improvements to the OS freed up resources for games.

Sent from Bittech Android app

 

Well, it could. I don't have a WiiU to notice the performance difference. If we are talking about games at 30fps jump to 60fps, then it's a the big rumored OC. If it's in some areas where the poorly ported EA games runs a bit smoother, then its the OS.

I guess a good way to know is to monitor the power draw before and after the max power draw. If the console is OC, it must consume more Watts (unless the processor has some odd broken power saving/consuming system, where lower clock consumes just as much as full clock)