Article written by tsa staff.
Published on 18/04/2012 at 03:55 PM.
Beamdog’s Trent Oster isn’t the biggest fan of developing for Nintendo.
The studio head, whose company Overhaul are currently working on the remake of Baldur’s Gate for iPad and PCs, said that he “doesn’t do Nintendo development” citing past interactions with the company for the main reason. ”Our previous experience with Nintendo was enough to ensure there will not be another,” he said.
Speaking to NintendoWorldReport, he added that the reasons include a paltry 40MB limit for WiiWare and the way Nintendo handled the game, its pricing and so on. ”I’m not an oracle on the problems with WiiWare,” he said, “but from my perspective the platform hasn’t been a success for many developers outside of Nintendo.”
“The 40MB size limit on WiiWare makes it very difficult to bring larger games to the platform,” he continued, referring to when his team remodelled MDK2 to fit the limit. “We had to go to war on MDK2 to get it to fit within the 40MB constraints, taking a 400 plus megabyte game and cutting it a full order of magnitude in size.”
“When we shipped MDK2 there was a large confusion about demos on the platform and we never got a straight answer if demos were allowed,” Oster continued.
“We were not allowed to set the price, Nintendo set the pricing, telling us after a week it would be 1000 points. As well, there was never any discussion of doing a sale or promoting the title. This all contributed to a title we worked very hard on not getting any differentiation from other titles in the WiiWare store. The result was large disappointment with the platform.”
“For the Wii U, I once again don’t get it,” he added. “I’m having a hard time seeing how a tablet controller & console system is going to be revolutionary.”
“I wish Nintendo the best and I hope they can hit big with a major success,” he concluded.
I couldn’t help but laugh when I first heard about this. Nintendo ruined a good opportunity to have a good game because their strict rules. It’s no wonder 3rd party developers didn’t want to support them with the Wii. This is the reason I think they will struggle with the Wii U
as long as mario lives & zelda Nintendo don’t care lol
You’re probably right but that attitude is what is killing Nintendo. They get a lot of sales from 1st party games but surely that can’t last forever and the Wii was full of shovelware. I had one and hardly bought anything because there was probably 1 good game to every 50 released. I hope they change their ways or it doesn’t look good for them in the future.
I think you might be onto something.
Ubisoft seems to be the biggest 3rd party developer that supports nin (might be wrong) but the wii U looks promising with more mature games as for the wii it was more family targeted & it worked but now kinect in the scene, guess it forced them to release a semi hardcore system. So hopefully more 3rd party games will be developed
40Mb? Blimey, that is restrictive.
Seems a strange reaction on his part really. The example he gave was refering to a wiiware game, which I’m not surprised had strict size limits, etc in the same way the PSN and XBL stores do.
Hopefully the Wii-U has some terrific third party support as its the only next gen console I intend on buying, assuming the rumours are true regarding pre-owned games on the PS4/NextBox
But 40mb?
That’s less than some save files!
On a PS3/360 sure but remember we are talking about a Wii console here with 512MB memory… it’s all relational
It’s still a joke of a limit, and does it really have 512mb?
I assume it’s expandable?
Nintendo pulled off a miracle with the Wii’s sales despite it’s limitations.
It won’t work a second time round though, judging by the Wii software uptake- a lot of those console buyers won’t come back for a more expensive console they don’t use.
Nintendo don’t need to match the powers of the PS4 or Xbox 3, but they need to be a lot closer, like the DS to PSP gap, or the 3DS to Vita.
It was expandable with off the shelf SD cards I believe but yeah 512MB is all you got initially, which considering Ninty weren’t constantly throwing patches and DLC at you it took a while to burn through that storage space :)
Personally I think the Wii-U will get it right in the end. Knowing them it will take a while for them to find their feet but having a console capable of playing games like Mario and Prof Layton as well as Ghost Recon, etc, (all in HD) sounds great to me.
I don’t think SDHC cards were compatible… I remember my camera’s old 4 gig card didn’t work
It MIGHT work in the current climate, against PS3 and 360, but when their successors come out?
The only chance Wii U has is as a budget console.
The impression I got is that Nintendo aren’t trying to compete with Sony/Microsoft with the Wii-U, at least not on a technical level.
Instead they are still focussing on the more casual side of gaming but have also taken onboard people’s, quite justified, complaints that there weren’t a lot of hardcore games on the Wii. Creating a common ground if you will.
I’m sure no one is looking at the Wii-U and expecting it to match the grunt seen in the next Sony/Microsoft consoles.
Seems crazy, Nintendo are sending out the wrong message to developers here, especially if they want to target the more ‘hardcore’ audience with the Wii U, unless they’re happy with the casual market they’ve attracted.
i think they are but i reckon the interesting thing is whether the new casual market will be willing to sign up for a new expensive bit of hardware.
For you and I upgrading is part of hardware ownership but theyll have never done it and i can hear them now “Whats wrong with the Wii we have?”, thats gonna be a huge thing for NIN to overcome.
The Wii U lacks a harddrive aswell, which could turn out to be its undoing come next gen.
I can see why many great 3rd part devs will never make games for Nintendo consoles!
Wii U will fail to.
Ruddy heck! 40mb limit, there are saves that are bigger then that! So how on earth is a developer supposed to create a game for Wiiware without having to sacrifice parts of their product?
Does explain why we never hear about a major game being released on Wiiware. Imagine trying to fit COD or Fifa into a 40MB file. Can’t be done.
Ninty risks putting themselves out of the industry as developers will get fed up with working towards a very strict limit when they can just switch to another platform, without any size limits or a limit that is reasonable. Mario and Link can’t make your consoles a success just by themselves Ninty.
Plus, indie developers probably won’t bother with coding for Wiiware due to that. Unless their game is designed to be less then 40mb but then chances are it’s a phone game or shovelware.
I don’t understand why everyone is so upset by the restriction. It’s comparable to PS Minis. It’s not Nintendo’s version of downloadable PSN games. The console is very restricted with the lack of a proper hard drive. That’s why there are disc releases for every party game out there. They have no other choice and people dealt with it so far. Sounds like they wanted to cheap out by releasing their game on a download platform that clearly wasn’t designed for such a platform instead of porting it properly for a disc release.
When you consider that minis, which were supposed to be micro PSP (another console with no HDD) mini games, have a limit of 100mb (250% of the Wii limit!), it’s an utterly ridiculous limit.
It doesn’t matter how high the limit is. The limit is set and the devs can’t do anything about it. Most devs simply don’t develop for such a platform but these guys do it and then complain about it.
The PSP also caters to a totally different group of gamers and Sony also makes money with their Memory Sticks so if you run out of memory and buy another Memory Stick, they are happy.
Am I the only person who thinks they are idiots for porting a 400 MB game to a platform that only allows 40 MB games and then complain about it?
I think I’m going to try to squeeze an elephant in my car and then complain to the manufacturer that it wouldn’t fit unless I cut off most of it…
Reminds me of the Valve situation. We all know how that turned out.
Agreed. Wiiware was never designed for massive projects like that. Games like World of Goo, etc were perfect as they weren’t massive games but were excellent and used the Wii remote perfectly.
I would imagine the size limits will be much larger on the Wii-U, asuming they are intending on creating an equivalent to XBL/PSN