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Secret Developers, The Wii U story - Digital Foundry Series

H

hesido

Member
Digital Foundry's article sheds some light on the experience of developing for the Wii U console at the time of launch, and provides some interesting tidbits on the [lack of] success with 3rd parties.

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.
Click to expand...

Clarification edit: The article contains further details on how the CPU can "punch above its weight" with some of its features, so the situation isn't as bad.

Having worked on other hardware consoles, I suppose that we were rather spoilt by having mature toolchains that integrated nicely with our development environment. 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.
Click to expand...

After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. 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 !
Click to expand...

At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?
Click to expand...

Provide a proper toolchain if old.

Via: Digital Foundry
 
T

ThoughtsOfSpeaking

Banned
Welp. Any WiiU owner citing "Lazy developers" for features missing in WiiU versions need to read this article.

The WiiU is simply dead weight for 3rd parties even if it was selling well.

Even on the most basic level, it is harder to make a game for the WiiU than last gens HD twins and The Next gen consoles.

At least the Wii had the benefit of basically being a gamecube.

Reading this, im surprised it got any third party support at all.
 
G

Griss

Member
It sounds exactly, almost to a word, what we all imagined it would be like.

Serious problems communicating with Japan, terrible documentation, lamentably underpowered CPU but good GPU and decent RAM. Considering that, why on earth would you bother?

I loved when Nintendo came back to them and said the online wouldn't be ready until right before launch, so they couldn't test properly, because:

There were apparently issues with setting up a large networking infrastructure to rival Sony and Microsoft that they hadn't envisaged.
Click to expand...

Jesus wept.
 
J

Juice

Member
Great article. As a developer and a Nintendo fan, I wouldn't want to go anywhere near working on this thing.

Janky visual studio plugins? Yuck

Multi-minute feedback loops? No thanks. Feedback loops longer than a few seconds put an upper bound on the number of thoughts you can exercise per day. Sounds absolutely awful

Slow, painful, low fidelity communication with the people who can get you answers? Noooooope,

Nintendo needs to stop doing this.
 
S

Some Nobody

Junior Member
Just finished reading this a moment ago. Sad tales. Of special note is this passage:

But what about the rest of the world? How had other development studios faired? The story of what happened next is pretty well documented in the gaming press, but I'd like to highlight some interesting points that have been on my mind recently. Firstly, third-party support. Do you remember all the hype surrounding the Wii U launch? All those third parties showing videos of existing games that they were going to bring to the Wii U? Whatever happened to a lot of those games?

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.
Click to expand...

Essentially, Nintendo has to go incredibly old-school: The only third-party support they can get is the kind that's exclusive to the Wii U. Admittedly, enough good games could "force" some gamers into buying the system, but honestly I think what's most likely is Nintendo working on the Wii U successor already while they continue to push out first-party titles as best they can to get used to the change over to HD.
 
M

MYE

Member
Is there any interview or tidbits regarding the development of Most Wanted U?
I think it was quickly ported by a small group of Criterion dudes and it ended up looking and running better than the PS360 releases.

Even if this is the case of some teams knowing how to work their shit out better than others, there is no excuse for not having a proper team to exchange info and clarify tech issues with dev houses across the pond. What the fuck?!

Someone spam Nintendo twitter accounts with this story.
 
N

NeoGash

Member
Man, this makes me want to cry and burst out laughing at the same time. I feel sorry for those developers, the support teams at Nintendo seem hopeless. They need to work with western developers much better.
 
M

Mpl90

Two copies sold? That's not a bomb guys, stop trolling!!!
MYE said:
Is there any interview or tidbits regarding the development of Most Wanted U?
I think it was quickly ported by a small group of Criterion dudes and it ended up looking and running better than the PS360 releases.

Even if this is the case of some teams knowing how to work their shit out better than others, there is no excuse for not having a proper team to exchange info and clarify tech issues with dev houses across the pond. What the fuck?!

Someone spam Nintendo twitter accounts with this story.
Click to expand...

I'm on it.
 
G

GameAddict411

Member
for what i understand the CPU is extremely underpowered, but the GPU is decent and beats last gen GPUs(it's really unremarkable). the developers tools on the other hand are absolutely terrible, the people here that were blaming developers for the bad multiplatform ports should be ashamed of themselves after reading this.
 
M

MYE

Member
Sage Shinigami said:
but honestly I think what's most likely is Nintendo working on the Wii U successor already while they continue to push out first-party titles as best they can to get used to the change over to HD.
Click to expand...

Of course they are. Once one is launched you start preparing the next one.
They never stop.
 
S

stryke

Member
MYE said:
Is there any interview or tidbits regarding the development of Most Wanted U?
I think it was quickly ported by a small group of Criterion dudes and it ended up looking and running better than the PS360 releases.
Click to expand...

I'm fairly certain there's a DF article on the Wii U port but it was by no means a "quick" port.
 
G

Griss

Member
Also, a lot of people on GAF always said 'why did people stop developing for the Wii U before we had any sales figures?'

It always seemed obvious to me that they'd been developing for it for a while, and then Microsoft and Sony came in with their more advanced boxes, better support and ease of development and higher likelihood of succeeding. At that point (still before Wii U launch) the decision was likely taken at most big 3rd parties to switch all teams to those two machines. You can't blame them, and it proved to be a simple and correct decision.

They also still can't shake this perception:
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.
Click to expand...

And if their tech support is that bad, then it's a correct perception.

I don't know where they go in the home console market from here. We've seen this story too many times now - there's no reason for a western 3rd party to ever do business with them again, especially not with the PS4 and XB1 set to dominate for the next 6 years.
 
K

Kysen

Member
As a developer there is nothing worse than having a time delay while debugging my code. 4min turn around must have been hell. Seems Nintendo is stuck in the same spot Sony was at with the PS3. Crap dev tools and poor documentation then add language barrier on top = disaster.
 
G

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Maybe EA got scared away when it became clearer how frustrating development would be, and cut back on projects as a result. Perhaps this kind of insight gives an idea of what happened to that 'unprecedented partnership'.
 
G

GameAddict411

Member
Griss said:
Also, a lot of people on GAF always said 'why did people stop developing for the Wii U before we had any sales figures?'

It always seemed obvious to me that they'd been developing for it for a while, and then Microsoft and Sony came in with their more advanced boxes, better support and ease of development and higher likelihood of succeeding. At that point (still before Wii U launch) the decision was likely taken at most big 3rd parties to switch all teams to those two machines. You can't blame them, and it proved to be a simple and correct decision.

They also still can't shake this perception:


And if their tech support is that bad, then it's a correct perception.

I don't know where they go in the home console market from here. We've seen this story too many times now - there's no reason for a western 3rd party to ever do business with them again, especially not with the PS4 and XB1 set to dominate for the next 6 years.
Click to expand...

I completely agree with you.
 
G

Griss

Member
TsuWave said:
reads like fiction
Click to expand...

Reads like anything but fiction. Every part of it is believable, and there's more than enough detail to the story to give it a ring of truth. It confirms pretty much every rumour we heard prior to launch, and other devs' stories afterwards. Not only that, but DigitalFoundry are very trustworthy, one or two next-gen misunderstandings aside. My bullshit detector remains firmly untroubled.
 
T

ThoughtsOfSpeaking

Banned
Reading all that, warts and all, it would have been better for Nintendo to just allow EA to create the networking capabilities of the console, even if it meant mandatory origin.

The fact that nobody had a clue about Live or PSN is mind boggling.
 
I

Infernal Monkey

Member
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!
Click to expand...

Good lord. It's crazy that this is a recent quote. It sounds like something from the late 90's.
 
B

bloodyroarxx

Member
Sage Shinigami said:
Just finished reading this a moment ago. Sad tales. Of special note is this passage:



Essentially, Nintendo has to go incredibly old-school: The only third-party support they can get is the kind that's exclusive to the Wii U. Admittedly, enough good games could "force" some gamers into buying the system, but honestly I think what's most likely is Nintendo working on the Wii U successor already while they continue to push out first-party titles as best they can to get used to the change over to HD.
Click to expand...

Can Nintendo release a successor anytime before 4-5 years?

Would the public even bite?
Do you do some kind of discount program or Wii U owners?
Do you make it backward compatible?
Do you keep the Wii U gamepad?

Like I guess IMO the best option would be releases it close to the 2 year anniversary of the PS4 and Xbone with some better internals slightly CPU/GPU/RAM compared to them at the same price of those 2 at the time and take the hit.

Keep the gamepad as is, and get some people with real online infrastructure experience onboard.

But would that be enough who knows?
 
G

Griss

Member
Also, I'm amazed that they actually outright stated to western devs that the technical goal of the box was to be quiet and unnoticeable. As the article says, surely alarm bells starting ringing right away. I suppose it was too late for Nintendo to take feedback into account at that stage, but surely someone could have told them how utterly fucking irrelevant that was compared to having enough power to easily brute force a PS360 port without having to make graphical sacrifices?

Did they not understand what a terrible social media blow it would be to be seen as 'the same power as next-gen, but 7 years late'. Did they really think that it being quiet was a reasonable aim in comparison?

Nintendo's chief of hardware development needs to take the fall for this one.
 
A

Atolm

Member
Nintendo needs new, fresh blood in there. As someone said this is something you would have expected to read in the '90s.
 
S

Some Nobody

Junior Member
MYE said:
Of course they are. Once one is launched you start preparing the next one.
They never stop.
Click to expand...

I'm talking about more than just preliminary talks. Seriously I don't even know what to say to Nintendo if they don't have a new console out by fall 2016. Don't try to force that shit into a 6 year cycle Nintendo. Two and a half more years and then we should see something that's much more of a jump over PS4 than the Wii U was over the PS3.
 
H

HooYaH

Member
I do wonder what the next Nintendo console will be internally. I wonder if they will go the same route as Sony/MS and ditch PowerPC to x86, but by doing that, BC is pretty much gone unless they want to spend money in their budget just to add it.

I have a gut feeling they may go ARM, firstly with the next DS (which already has it in the 3DS), and then the console.
 
G

GameAddict411

Member
Griss said:
Also, I'm amazed that they actually outright stated to western devs that the technical goal of the box was to be quiet and unnoticeable. As the article says, surely alarm bells starting ringing right away. I suppose it was too late for Nintendo to take feedback into account at that stage, but surely someone could have told them how utterly fucking irrelevant that was compared to having enough power to easily brute force a PS360 port without having to make graphical sacrifices?

Did they not understand what a terrible social media blow it would be to be seen as 'the same power as next-gen, but 7 years late'. Did they really think that it being quiet was a reasonable aim in comparison?

Nintendo's chief of hardware development needs to take the fall for this one.
Click to expand...

both the PS4 and the XO are very quiet, so there are no excuses for nintendo.
 
M

MYE

Member
stryke said:
I'm fairly certain there's a DF artucle on the Wii U article but it was by no means a "quick" port.
Click to expand...


"The difference with Wii U was that when we first started out, getting the graphics and GPU to run at an acceptable frame-rate was a real struggle. The hardware was always there, it was always capable. Nintendo gave us a lot of support - support which helps people who are doing cross-platform development actually get the GPU running to the kind of rate we've got it at now. We benefited by not quite being there for launch - we got a lot of that support that wasn't there at day one... the tools, everything."

"There's a switch in our build pipeline that says 'use PC textures' and we flipped that and that was all," Hamadi laughs. "I can take no credit for that, it was literally ten minutes' work... we are using PS3/360 geometry. It's just the textures we upgraded."

"So, I think you've got one group of people who walked away, you've got some other people who just dived in and tried and thought, 'Ah... it's not kind of there,' but not many people have done what we've done, which is to sit down and look at where it's weaker and why, but also see where it's stronger and leverage that. It's a different kind of chip and it's not fair to look at its clock-speed and other consoles' clock-speed and compare them as numbers that are relevant. It's not a relevant comparison to make when you have processors that are so divergent. It's apples and oranges."

It's possible. It's work. You have to think about it and put time and craft and effort and whatever else into it but you have to do that for everything that's worth doing in this business... I think people should either go all-in or not bother."

hmm
 
Y

ymmv

Banned
Griss said:
Also, I'm amazed that they actually outright stated to western devs that the technical goal of the box was to be quiet and unnoticeable. As the article says, surely alarm bells starting ringing right away. I suppose it was too late for Nintendo to take feedback into account at that stage, but surely someone could have told them how utterly fucking irrelevant that was compared to having enough power to easily brute force a PS360 port without having to make graphical sacrifices?

Did they not understand what a terrible social media blow it would be to be seen as 'the same power as next-gen, but 7 years late'. Did they really think that it being quiet was a reasonable aim in comparison?

Nintendo's chief of hardware development needs to take the fall for this one.
Click to expand...

The real issue is not how consumers react but how developers/publishers see this: this is not a next gen console like the PS4 and Xbox One. Once next gen starts, the whole industry will switch to PC like gaming consoles with advanced online capabilities. The Wii U is stuck with an underpowered PowerPC CPU, a weak GPU, a barebones online infrastructure, awful development tools and a fanbase that doesn't buy third party software. Porting games will become impossible in a few years but it doesn't matter because the games won't sell anyway.
 
I

Interceptor

Banned
I miss the Wii U Story. All I see are some quotes of whiny developers who sound made up just for the clicks. On top of that it's a df article.
 
S

Some Nobody

Junior Member
Griss said:
Also, I'm amazed that they actually outright stated to western devs that the technical goal of the box was to be quiet and unnoticeable. As the article says, surely alarm bells starting ringing right away. I suppose it was too late for Nintendo to take feedback into account at that stage, but surely someone could have told them how utterly fucking irrelevant that was compared to having enough power to easily brute force a PS360 port without having to make graphical sacrifices?

Did they not understand what a terrible social media blow it would be to be seen as 'the same power as next-gen, but 7 years late'. Did they really think that it being quiet was a reasonable aim in comparison?

Nintendo's chief of hardware development needs to take the fall for this one.
Click to expand...

It's not just Nintendo's chief of hardware. It's their entire view on how the industry should work, according to them. The whole thing is flawed. The PS4 is as powerful as it is while still being quieter than the PS3 and it doesn't even need a fucking huge power brick like the Wii U's.
 
M

Mpl90

Two copies sold? That's not a bomb guys, stop trolling!!!
Ok, tweeted it to NoA, NoE and Dan Adelman.

I was even thinking of doing a Twitter campaign about it. What tag would you suggest?
 
G

Griss

Member
ymmv said:
The real issue is not how consumers react but how developers/publishers see this: this is not a next gen console like the PS4 and Xbox One. Once next gen starts, the whole industry will switch to PC like gaming consoles with advanced online capabilities. The Wii U is stuck with an underpowered PowerPC CPU, a weak GPU, a barebones online infrastructure, awful development tools and a fanbase that doesn't buy third party software. Porting games will become impossible in a few years but it doesn't matter because the games won't sell anyway.
Click to expand...

Sorry, that's a very good point. People often forget (as I just did) that devs come first. People buy consoles for games. To get games, you must impress devs. And a 'low draw' console designed to be quiet with a crazy underpowered CPU isn't going to cut it.

Thank god for Cerny, or who knows what would have happened with the PS4.
 
S

Sadist

Member
Ugh, Nintendo outside of Japan in terms of technical support is horrid. Forget the new console for now, but NCL really needs to invest in technical support that don't have to wait for Japanese documentation or assist third partjes. It wouldn't solve everything, but it's an important start.
 
E

Exterminieren

Banned
This is astonishingly embarrassing, even if it's only tangentially true.

What the fuck is Nintendo thinking of?

Mpl90 said:
Ok, tweeted it to NoA, NoE and Dan Adelman.

I was even thinking of doing a Twitter campaign about it. What tag would you suggest?
Click to expand...

What on Earth do you think that'll solve? No one who has any sway over these issues reads the Twitter accounts you talk about, and they'll already be well aware of the issues anyway. If the guys in Japan aren't listening to the concerns of prominent Western devs, the idea that they're going to take notice of a Twitter campaign by random Western fans is beyond laughable.
 
G

gogogow

Member
gofreak said:
Maybe EA got scared away when it became clearer how frustrating development would be, and cut back on projects as a result. Perhaps this kind of insight gives an idea of what happened to that 'unprecedented partnership'.
Click to expand...

I doubt it. Ubisoft otoh have no problems supporting the consoles with it's AAA titles. Or maybe Ubisoft are better programmers.
 
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