I interpreted your point as 'CPU down-scaling is much more difficult than GPU down-scaling'. Which would be one-sided, at best, and incorrect, if we really try to delve into it. But since apparently I misinterpreted you and you didn't say that, I apologize.
Haha, well I did say that, but that was tangential to my main point. I will own it, however. How am I incorrect?
IMHO if you think about the things you can scale in a game, they pretty much come in two classes: things that affect the game design directly (number of enemies is an obvious one) and things that do not (higher resolution textures, more particles, better shaders, anti-aliasing, etc.)
There are certainly GPU related things that can affect game design - for example, rendering could be the bottleneck if you are trying to figure out how much stuff you can pack into your open world game and still maintain a playable framerate. But I would argue that if you look at where the bottleneck lies for things that affect the game design directly, most of those fall into the CPU side of the equation, and thus, in general, it is easier to scale the graphics workload to have a similar game experience than to scale the processor workload.
I mean, as it is, the player counts have been scaled down in Battlefield multiplayer on console and I think I would argue that the experience on console is not the same as PC, despite the efforts that DICE have made to balance the game for console player counts. If you scaled them down further - say you could only have 8 or 12 players on WiiU. Is it still the same game as the 360/PS3 version? You'd have to change the maps yet again to get a similar player density, just to start, and that's what I talk about when I say they would have to put in extra effort.
Let's put it another way - why is it we see so many graphical scalability options on PC, where you have a wide range of hardware, but you pretty much never see an "AI: dumb-------smart" (or "num enemies: few------many") slider to get it to run on a min spec PC? (I mean, sure, maybe that is what the difficulty setting is, but I don't know if I've ever seen a recommendation to play a game on easy mode to get it to run on your 10 year old PC
Well, what do you believe Xenon has over Expresso? (a sincere question)
I think I made it clear in my last post - that overall, the Xenon has more computational power than the Espresso. The Espresso may be more efficient per watt or per clock, but 3.2GHz of brute force seems to carry the day from what people seem to say.
If your game is not CPU bound on 360 then the WiiU is probably a fantastic platform as you can take advantage of the improved GPU and the extra memory. If you are CPU bound, then you have some difficult decisions to make in order to make your game performant.
You are speaking of a company who spent the resources to port their flagship racer to the WiiU (Criterion FTW) where it runs best among all consoles, but still refuses to add the DLC from the other consoles. Are we really sure they like money? I, for one, am not.
Even in this case, where the DLC is basically finished, there are still certification and QA costs involved. It's possible that the game's sales on WiiU do not justify even this minimal cost to bring the DLC over. (I have no idea how many copies of NFS were sold on the WiiU. Maybe if they sold millions of copies, then they really are holding it back out of spite!)
Which means (some) devs have an established narrative (which I disagree about in the Tekken case) when it comes to picking excuses why this or that wouldn't make it to the WiiU. Have you read Criterion's account on the matter? Even better, have you seen their effort on the WiiU?
NFS is the definition of a game that does not seem to be CPU bound - it was ported mostly intact to the PlayStation Vita, which is souped up smartphone hardware. I don't know if I would use that as an example to illustrate why there are no problems with the performance of the WiiU CPU.
