Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 not coming to Wii U due to budget constraints
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 isn't coming to the Wii U because of budgetary constraints, since another port would require 20 more workers.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 is making the transition to PC, but Konami has no plans to bring it to the Wii U. So why is the company skipping the latest video game console on the market? According to producer Dave Cox, it comes down to budget and resources.
"The reason why we are developing it on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is simply because that's the amount of people we got," Cox told Eurogamer. "If we want to do a Wii U conversion, that's another 20 people. We just don't have the resources or the budget to do it."
While Cox doesn't rule it out sometime in the future, "at this point we don't want to lose focus on what we're doing. We've got a certain way down the line, and it would be a distraction to have to do a port to another system at this point." He also noted that the office space intended for 60 employees is crowded with 110 currently, making bringing on even more workers a logistical issue.
Previously, when Cox announced that it was coming to PC but not Wii U, he noted that the Wii U doesn't have a large install base. That implies that if the system weren't suffering from a sales slump, the decision might be different.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 not coming to Wii U due to budget constraints.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 isn't coming to the Wii U because of budgetary constraints, since another port would require 20 more workers.-
I'm definitely interested in seeing this on PC.
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there was a time when devs were jumping all over themselves to get a port to the Wii, and that was a generation behind graphically from the ps3/360. Guess WiiU doesn't have the install base that would make this profitable yet.
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Catch 22.
No games, no sales.
No sales, no games.
These guys are being penny wise and pound foolish.
I think Nintendo is going to have to open their wallets and buy the ports for their system, much like SONY and MS did back in the day.
Iwata needs to stop apologizing and hand over some cash to get things rolling.
These aren't the 1980's when Nintendo dominated. -
Nah, for the half-assed ports we got at launch from 360 code it should be pretty simple (and therefor, cheap) to port that code over to the Wii U comparatively. If they were to optimize it then yeah, not so great. I think the issue is the perceived audience isn't there even though they're starving for titles atm.
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The quote makes it sound like it might happen later, but I'm not too worried about it. Love metroid, can't get into castlevania for some reason.
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I really want to know what Nintendo did to piss off all of the 3rd party devs.
Everyone seemed pretty enthusiastic to develop for the system before the release. Some developers such as Treyarch reported that developing for the console was painless. Suddenly after the release of the system, planned ports just suddenly backed away.-
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This I agree with. Nintendo made the mistake of releasing a system with no killer app to demonstrate the potential of the hardware.
Yea sure New Super Mario U is great and all, but is it really a game that is indicative of the system? Fuck no. Take away the tacked on boost mode and you've got a game you can theoretically play on the Gamecube.
Compare it to the last few systems that had a killer app on release or around the horizon. Wii had Wii Sports, Gamecube had Smash Melee in view since the system's announcement, N64 had Mario 64, SNES had Mario World and a myriad of great 3rd party titles on launch.
Instead of creating a 2D mario game with Co-op, why couldn't they have created a 3d mario game with co-op? The screen controller left this option open and Nintendo instead wasted its time with a gameplay model that was grossly oversaturated by Nintendo themselves (releasing nearly 3 other New Super Mario games in the past 3 years). To top it off, Nintendo makes its 1st quarter announcement with nothing yet that is considered a killer app. They are even releasing yet another 2d side scroller with Yoshi. Have mercy. What the hell are they thinking?
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Nintendo hardware has always been notoriously difficult to develop for (I haven't had 1st hand experience, so just repeating what I heard)
But honestly, it's because of the costs and split in the industry. The wii was cool and novel, but remember the first couple years when they tried to cram Call of Duty and Farcry on it? It was ridiculous, you essentially need to develop a totally seperate game, you can't just branch off your main development.
So here comes WiiU, we can now port 360 and Ps3 games.... great, that has a life span of a year, a year and a half? It's pointless by the time we start making Ps4 and Xbox Whatever games, the same thing happens, so you're spending way more money on creating a separate game to work on the WiiU.-
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Pretty sure the N64 was pretty difficult due to massive RAM limitations and the cartridge storage space. I don't recall any of the other systems being hard to develop for. The issue is that big publishers haven't gotten tradtional game sales from the past 3 console generations on Nintendo and aren't particularly interested in investing there again.
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That's at the hardware layer. N64 was actually easier to develop for than the PSX at the soft layer. It was the licensing restriction and the overhead to produce each copy that cinched it in favor for Sony.
Wii was a little more difficult due to the precision required to program for motion.-
one of the big downfalls of the N64 was the cart space. the PS1 era was the era of every game having huge cinematic cutscenes every 14 or 15 seconds, and you just couldnt do that on 64mb cartridge. wasnt FF7 originally an N64 title, but they realized there was 0 chance of it being the game they wanted? you cant underestimate that factor of the n64's hardware, being a cart system held it back way more than any increase in processing capability it had over the optical systems it was competing against.
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Square had its next Final Fantasy to be media based ever since the possibility of an SNES CD attachment. They really wanted the series to head in this direction by FF6. After the fallout, Square had to stick to its guns and had to move to Playstation from the onset.
While there was no intention to make FF7 for N64, they explored the possibility of making a Final Fantasy on the N64. This came in the form of the conceptual SGI demo.
This was done on Silicon Graphic's Onyx stations (remember them). Not longer after the demo was premiered, square announced FF7 with a ton of already done work on models such as Cloud (translated as Claude at the time), Barret (thought to be translated as Bullet at the time), Aeris, and the frog. There was a "Barrier" meter at the time as well on the battle interface. Midgar was already fully rendered as well. The amount of work already done supports Square's claim that they had zero intention of ever releasing Final Fantasy on N64. -
and personal anecdote. The moment I saw this announcement on my Gamefan mag, I immediately cancelled my N64 preorder and bought a Playstation with that money.
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Sony and MS are surviving off third party support to a big degree. they have something to lose if there aren't incentives there. Nintendo has a different system where it doesn't matter.
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its not that they pissed them off, so much as they ignored them for ages. N had super, super restrictive third party contracts back in the NES/SNES days, and they tried to carry that over into the 5th generation. developers jumped ship to Sony because Sony was not as restrictive. you could make a game for the PSX and they didnt really care if you made it for the Saturn, Windows, whatever. and the liscensing was cheaper too IIRC. somehow N managed to survive and even though they loosened those restrictions, they had basically an entire console generation where third parties, unless you were one of the small number of N favored folks, had been pissed on.
i am not sure about the GC days, but by then you got all these companies being super successful with Sony and familiar with doing business with them, and then you get MS coming in and being pretty easy to work with. so while N was no longer pissing on developers, they were not doing anything to court them either. they were satisfied with their own software and the software from the handful of golden children they had cultivated. N hasnt courted third parties ever, really, until now. its easy to see why they are having problems.
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