There's a PS3 story regards ICE and ND. Originally Sony wasn't going to share take as a competitive advantage, but they realised the error of their thinking and that all games on the platform need to be good, not just exclusives.
Would GTA V be possible on Wii U?
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I don't know why people are going on about sales and market conditions considering your question seems to be a pure technical one.
WiiU has a slower clocked but much more efficient CPU than PS360, 32MB's more eDRAM than PS3, 20MB's more eDRAM than 360, over half a GB more RAM specifically for games, a much, much more modern GPU which at launch was handling AAA third party PS360 games like AC3, ME3 and Blops 2 and later on ports of Batman Arkham Origins and Splinter Cell Blacklist.
GTA V will never come to WiiU because of the size of the install base and the sales of other 'mature' third party titles but to suggest the console isn't capable of running the game from a technical perspective is laughable considering what we have seen from WiiU's first party games and it running quick, cheap PS360 ports done by tiny C level / mobile development teams in less than six months.
The biggest hurdle would be WiiU's inability to install games, because of this pop in would be the biggest issue (like Arkham Origins) but at 720p and on par with PS360 level GTA V visuals I don't see why Rockstar couldn't get the game running at 30fps locked if enough time / money was spent on development. Obviously it wouldn't look anything like as good as the PS4/Xbone versions of GTA V considering those consoles at ~8x as powerful as WiiU on paper.
The engine is highly scalable but the actual game may not scale down well to WiiU CPU levels. R* spent years banging on the CPUs of the PS360 to get this game to where it is. Perhaps reducing simulation complexity (i.e. removing enough objects) would allow it to manage though.
The game would also likely break without some kind of mandatory install to a much-faster-then-optical HDD, relegating sales to negative territory.
But most of all, porting would be like setting fire to money, pissing on it, letting it dry out, then setting fire to it again.
The game would also likely break without some kind of mandatory install to a much-faster-then-optical HDD, relegating sales to negative territory.
But most of all, porting would be like setting fire to money, pissing on it, letting it dry out, then setting fire to it again.
Why play it on a small screen when you're limited to playing it at home where you have a big screen available? There is no logic in what you said because WiiU is not portable like Vita is.
a few = many, few = not many.
This would definitely be the biggest hurdle for Rockstar. I wonder if mandatory installs are possible on WiiU. Obviously the game(s) would have to be labelled as needing "x amount of HDD space". I just don't think the console was designed with installs in mind at all which is strange considering how many third parties were on board prior to launch.
I really don't think it's all that expensive to port PS360 games to WiiU (esp as most third parties use C level / outside / mobile development houses to do it. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that a typical port costs just $1.3 million. If we up GTA V's budget to $2 million the game would only have to sell around 75 000 copies on WiiU to break even using the $27 per third party sale publishers receive rule.
I struggle to understand why Nintendo don't just pay for the development of certain big name third party ports if all it would cost them is a few million dollars. Surely having the likes of GTAV, Destiny, Tomb Raider and MGS on their system would drive several million hardware sales.
There was a good explanation earlier in the thread. Basically, for your typical third party that had experience developing on XBox 360 and PS3, there's no reason to make a game on Wii U and not those other two, because Wii U doesn't offer enough over the others to really differentiate a port. Unless you have some really great idea for changing up gameplay with the Wii U tablet, which third parties don't seem that interested in.
This means that pretty much anything third parties release for Wii U will also be released on XB360/PS3. Then the question isn't just if Wii U owners will buy it, but would they have also not bought it for XB360/PS3? There just aren't that many gamers that don't own either of the older consoles and are interested in what third parties are making.
Commenter said:
I'm skeptical that any relevant number of people buy Wii U games to play it exclusively on the tablet.
Nintendo talks about how moms like to have a totally noiseless console so they're not distracted while doing the dishes, and they like being able to put little Timmy on the controller so they can watch their reality shows on the family TV. I think Nintendo is out of touch with what households are actually like these days.
Nope (save maybe in American as an anomalous use). 'A fair few' or 'quite a few' would mean many. 'A few' means not many.
Few people got on the bus. - not many people
A few people got on the bus. - not many people
A fair few people got on the bus. - lots of people
Sigfried1977
Legend
I think the people who think Bayonetta 2 sales are gonna set the world on fire are in for a rude awakening. The first game didn't sell particularly well despite being available on two systems with traditionally strong third party sales, so why would a sequel exclusive to a system of which the owners tend to not give a fuck about anything that hasn't Mario, Link or Pokemen in it start to care all of a sudden? Just fyi, Platinum's last game,The Wonderful 101, sold less than 6000 copies in Japan during its release week. Struggling system or not, that is one abysmally poor figure no matter how you look at it.
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Who said Bayo 2 is going to "set the world on fire" ?. Platinum's games always sell terribly, they struggled to hit 1.5 million copies sold of Rising on a 160 million install base even with the Metal Gear IP...
W-101 and Bayo 2 were funded by Nintendo to tempt a small pool of the 'hardcore' gaming audience to pick up WiiU and going on threads / comments on the more hardcore forums they certainly did for W-101.
You could include some data on a small USB drive to mimic an install, meaning every WiiU could run it, but that would throw the economics off even further. Could be done, though ...
Something seems off about those numbers. If 75,000 sales were breakeven for a $2 million project, then 1 million sales would lead to 'mad profitz' for even a $20 million project. And stuff like Bioshock infinite wouldn't be seen as a commercial failure with several million sales under its belt.
I suspect it's rather harder to make profits than simple maths would show ... and GTA would probably a big bugger to port. The testing work alone would be a huge undertaking, and you couldn't combine costs with PS360 testing.
The development costs of GTA 5 would appear to be staggering, but as R* are cagey about costs we don't have any official figures to throw about.
I think Nintendo did try at first, offering inducements for publishers. But the sales weren't there, and the ports were normally a little inferior. Not enough to really spoil the games, but not enough to undermine Nintendo line of being way beyond PS360 in terms of capability.
I'm not actually sure how many millions of sales PS360 level ports of these games would actually drive. I guess Nintendo considered it a bigger risk than putting that money into their own WiiU games that probably would begin to drive sales to at least some extent. But this is OT, so I think we should leave this contemplation for elsewhere.
I would really like to know the thinking behind Nintendo not at least supporting forced installs considering most modern engines on PS360 use them. I think we all know the reason there wasn't a large HDD in WiiU is because of a combination of cost and their desire to keep the console as small as possible.
I have read the figure of $27 per sale to the publisher on several occasions and in many different reports into the average breakdown of a $60 game over the years so I think it's at least very close if not 100% correct.
If WiiU games cost let's say $3 million to develop and market then they would need to sell just over 1 million copies to break even. A quick look at some WiiU AAA third party game sales (a few are around 70 000, most are under 50 000 sales) tells you exactly why GTAV isn't on WiiU and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the console not being able to run it.
Honestly the WiiU 'power debate' has gone from the console not being as powerful as PS4/Xbone to it being on par with PS360 to it now being weaker than PS360 in the space of less than two years... Astounding.
You must have been paying too much attention to what Nintendo cheerleaders have been saying if you've been seeing that large of a swing in range of power discussions. The sensible people haven't changed their view or opinions on the matter much in that span of two years. Learn to ignore the noise and pay attention to the signal.
Nintendo cheerleaders ?...
The facts are there on paper -
Slower clocked but much more efficient Out of Order CPU.
Much more modern and efficient GPU.
32MB's more eDRAM than PS3.
22MB's more eDRAM than the 360.
4x the system RAM, over 2x the RAM for games compared to PS360.
No proper third party developer has been allowed to touch the system outside of Criterion Games and even then with a small development cycle and budget they managed to get the PC textures running in NFS Most Wanted.
Only someone willing to ignore those facts truly believes WiiU is less powerful for than PS360.
The facts are there on paper -
Slower clocked but much more efficient Out of Order CPU.
Much more modern and efficient GPU.
32MB's more eDRAM than PS3.
22MB's more eDRAM than the 360.
4x the system RAM, over 2x the RAM for games compared to PS360.
No proper third party developer has been allowed to touch the system outside of Criterion Games and even then with a small development cycle and budget they managed to get the PC textures running in NFS Most Wanted.
Only someone willing to ignore those facts truly believes WiiU is less powerful for than PS360.
There are plenty of people who've hands-on worked with the WiiU that believe it's less powerful than the PS360.
A nicer GPU isn't much consolation if your CPU limited game is stuttering.
And for the record, no-one with an ounce of common sense ever believed that the WiiU was even remotely close to PS4Bone in terms of power. Just a look at the case and fan in 2012 instantly told you that.
I speculated that there might be as few as 160 shaders back in 2012. Hooray for me. I win (nothing). (As usual tbh).
A nicer GPU isn't much consolation if your CPU limited game is stuttering.
And for the record, no-one with an ounce of common sense ever believed that the WiiU was even remotely close to PS4Bone in terms of power. Just a look at the case and fan in 2012 instantly told you that.
I speculated that there might be as few as 160 shaders back in 2012. Hooray for me. I win (nothing). (As usual tbh).
Sure, don't list out the known negatives of the WiiU system (lesser bandwidth for one, pure shit SDK for two, pure shit system documentation for three). Only someone willing to ignore the negative facts truly believes the WiiU is more powerful in all regards to the PS360. That is why you're surprised at the reality that in some areas the WiiU is a lesser system than 7 and 8 year old hardware.
And you wonder why many reasonable people on these forums despise others who fail to consider the entire picture, the blind faithful, and the cheerleaders.
I suppose Cell is much more powerful in some respects but then again it's a lot more powerful in those same respects than the CPU's in PS4 and Xbone.
The GPU is much more efficient and modern in it's feature set, there is more to a GPU than just flops. The WiiU's memory bandwidth is also completely built around it's eDRAM so the main system RAM isn't really an issue. We have never once heard developers complain about it's RAM bandwidth.
I take it you are referring to the Eurogamer article when you talk about the "SDK and system documentation being shit" ?. That was in the months leading up to launch, I'm sure both are much better now just like PS4 and Xbone's SDK's and tools have improved greatly since launch.
The people on the other side of the argument are just as bad tbh, they fail to take into account that WiiU with its "shit" SDK's, tools and documentation, rushed development with tiny C tier / mobile development teams / tiny budgets was running 6th generation PS360 third party games like Assassin's Creed III, Blops II almost at parity on day one.
People seem to think WiiU won't ever produce anything better than what we saw at launch yet all you ever hear from PS4/Xbone owners / fans is "Infamous and Killzone are just year one games, just wait until year three and four !!!" ect.
The sad fact is we won't ever see what more 'realistic' looking third party games will look like on WiiU because of it's sales. I think Watch Dogs might be the best comparison when it releases later this year when looking at the differences between PS360, WiiU and PS4/Xbone multiplatform games. Even then though the WiiU WD port won't be being worked on by the main development team as they are now working on AC Unity, Farcry 4 and more than likely WD 2.
Wii U's CPU may be OoO, but it's barely skirting over 1.2 GHz and it doesn't even have true SIMD (it's 64/2 x 32 bit per core) which means it's theoretical floating point and vector performance sucks. Many of the best games this gen took full advantage of the SIMD capabilities of the Cell (8 x 128 bit) and Xenon (3 x 128 bit). So good luck getting BF3/4, GTAV, and many of the other animation and physics driven titles out there to run decently on the Wii U without really paring it down.
Now this doesn't mean devs can't make good games for the Wii U but there are of course limits and many devs who are used to all that SIMD are not going want to be constrained and don't want to run the risk of having a relatively low player base to cater to. The Wii U is the classic Nintendo style of hardware that is completely geared towards internal Nintendo development.
So I believe that GTAV as we know it on 360 and PS3 is pretty much impossible on the Wii U unless you want to play at 10 FPS.
Now this doesn't mean devs can't make good games for the Wii U but there are of course limits and many devs who are used to all that SIMD are not going want to be constrained and don't want to run the risk of having a relatively low player base to cater to. The Wii U is the classic Nintendo style of hardware that is completely geared towards internal Nintendo development.
So I believe that GTAV as we know it on 360 and PS3 is pretty much impossible on the Wii U unless you want to play at 10 FPS.
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