Why third-party publishers still aren

[compl3x]

Industry watchers have been worrying about continuing third-party support for the Wii U even beforeEA announced this year's Madden would not be coming to the system. Now, there are more signs that EA and other third-party publishers are increasingly reluctant to devote significant resources to the stalling system.

 

In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Ubisoft chairman and CEO Yves Guillemot noted that its exclusive Wii U launch title ZombiU was not even close to profitable, despite a generally positive reception from players and critics. The poor sales performance means Ubisoft is not eager to work on a sequel, and their experience even fed into the decision to change the promising Rayman Legendsfrom a Wii U exclusive to a multi platform title, Guillemot said.

 

"We must find a way to ensure the creativity of those games could have a big enough audience," Guillemot told GamesIndustry. "We hope it will take off. At the moment, we've said 'let's do through Christmas and see where we are from there.'"

 

Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg noted that his company came to the Wii U launch with a "robust slate" of games, but he said they have no new announcements for the system (outside of this holiday'sSkylanders Swap Force). EA's Peter Moore said that the games it has released have seen "poor sell-through" and, worse, very little use of online services.

 

"The lack of online engagement that we see on Wii U [is troubling]," Moore said. "It's so integral to what we do. They're so small it's hardly worth running the servers. It seems like a box that's out of sync with the future of EA?which is one that gives a real social feel to our games. The Wii U feels like an offline experience right now."

 

If you sell it, they will come

Everyone seems to agree the solution is simple?get more Wii U units into consumers' homes. "Look, the only thing they can do to fix it is to sell more boxes," EA Labels President Frank Gibeau told Joystiq last month. "We're a rational company. We go where the audience is."

 

Ubisoft's Guillemot is on the same page when talking about the decision to take Rayman Legendsmulti-platform. "What happened was that we saw the Wii U was not going to sell enough of those games," he told GamesBeat last month. "The game is going to be fantastic, and we didn?t want those creators to wind up in a position where even after making a fantastic game, they didn?t sell well enough."

 

But Nintendo has a long way to go to turn the Wii U into a system that can support significant software sales. The system sold fewer than 40,000 units in the US in each of April and May this year, according to leaked reports of NPD data. That's down even compared to disappointing sales numbersfrom the first three months of the year, and it's comparable to concurrent sales for the nearly seven-year-old original Wii. Wii U sales are just as disappointing in Europe, and while things look slightly better for the system in Japan, sales there are being dwarfed by the success of the 3DS and even the PS3.

 

For its part, Nintendo realizes it has work to do in making the Wii U an enticing place to release games. At a recent shareholder meeting, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said he expects the release of upcoming first-party titles like Pikmin 3 and Super Mario 3D World will help buoy hardware sales. That in turn will get more third-party publishers "to see Wii U as a platform with which they feel they can make profits from an economical perspective," he said.

 

But Iwata also said that Nintendo couldn't just "[buy] our way to create such a good condition for developers, [because] our own business could collapse." That seems to indicate the company isn't willing to pay publishers to attract the third-party titles it wants and needs, or to slash the price of the system, 3DS style, to help prop up the hardware user base. True to form, Nintendo said last monththat consumers shouldn't expect a Wii U price cut any time soon.

 

While acknowledging poor hardware sales, Iwata laid some of the blame for poor third-party performance on the Wii U at the foot of the publishers themselves. "Most [third-party launch games] were converted from other platforms and therefore could not enjoy brisk sales," he said. "As a result, some software developers have become pessimistic about Wii U." That doesn't explain the commercial failure of ZombiU, of course, but it is a fair assessment of a lot of the system's tepid third-party, launch-window offerings.

 

At the same time, Iwata noted that upcoming titles like Watch Dogs, Batman: Arkham Origins, andDisney Infinity are part of a dozen or so third-party titles that will be coming to the Wii U this year. He also hinted that "there are more key titles to be announced by [third-party publishers]." We'll believe that when we hear it from the publishers' mouths, because all we're hearing right now is doom and gloom when it comes to significant outside support for Nintendo's latest system.

 

 

Source

[Mainer82]

I'm actually planning on buying a Wii U tonight and ZombieU.

[n_K]

ZombieU wasn't profitable? How not so! Everyone I've heard that's got a wiiu has got zombieu too.

Doesn't sound good at all.

[dead.cell]

ZombieU wasn't profitable? How not so! Everyone I've heard that's got a wiiu has got zombieu too.

Doesn't sound good at all.

 

Apparently, that wasn't enough. I don't know anyone with a Wii U personally. Everyone I know that's considering one (myself included) is waiting for a price drop first. :ermm:

[NeoTrunks]

I don't have ZombieU. When I played the demo, the controls just felt so stiff. It reminded me a lot of Condemned: Criminal Origins on the 360, but even stiffer than that. I'll give it another go. I did like the atmosphere of the demo.