Wii U News: Nintendo and Wii U Are Difficult to Work With, Says Third-Party Developer
Nintendo's struggles to attract buyers to its Wii U console have been well documented, with one major factor in the lagging sales the distinct lack of third-party titles. Now, as one developer comes forward, we have a much clearer answer for why there's a lack of third-party games on the console: Nintendo makes it incredibly difficult to develop games for the Wii U.
A developer, who did not reveal his or her name or what company they worked for, recently spoke to Eurogamer and discussed what it was like to develop a third-party game for the Wii U. The developer revealed that when trying to set up a game's online features, the developer learned that Nintendo employees in charge of setting up Nintendo's own online networks do not use Xbox Live or the PlayStation network, so referencing those online networks would be useless.
"...we probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. 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?" the unidentified developer told Eurogamer.
This is huge news as this shows Nintendo's alleged ignorance when it comes to building an online network and finding a way for the Wii U to compete with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and their online-heavy features. However, the Wii U's problems go beyond just the console's online support team. It seems as though Nintendo has rather byzantine ways of supporting all of their English-speaking staff members.
When the developer's team ran into programming problems, Nintendo of America was unable to help them, so they had to ask the main Nintendo support team in Japan for advice. What follows is a downright bizarre chain of communication that Nintendo apparently uses for all their third-party developers:
"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 time zone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week!"
This just goes to show how Nintendo has struggled to modernize itself and its hardware and why the Wii U is far behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in sales and other areas.