Gear Box says Wii U is Next gen and Powerful, with online you come to expect.

[KingOfSentinels]

THQ's money problems strike again. Guess they don't want to gamble on a new system until they know if it's a success or a flop.

[Alucard]

What! But I was promised it would be different this time around because nintendo is fixing its mistakes and publishers would be LEAPING for some of nintendos 800 billion customers!

[thesoftware6180]

"As we got along in the development process, we just really wanted to focus on what we knew, focus on PS3, 360 and PC," he added.

"The verdict is out on what we can do to maximise the code for the Wii U, and we'll see [what happens]."

Sounds lazy to me.

1 dev won't bring 1 game to the wii u. The system is doomed.

[Alucard]

Thats how it started for the dreamcast and gamecube. If EA does it thats it, game over.

[Escaflowne2001]

Of course the developer doesn't know the PS3 either as Metro2033 was never on the PS3.

[KingOfSentinels]

But the PS3 is successful, the game will sell on that. If the Wii U does a Vita, THQ might not be able to take that hit. They're not even having a booth at E3 this year, they're pretty skint.

[thesoftware6180]

EA will be on the system. They are not in a huge financial problem.

THQ has a new president, ND co-founder Jason Rubin. The other guy got shit canned.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/...-thq-president

[Zack]

good replacement. rubin is smart

[Joe Redifer]

THQ is shit. Who cares what they do? Why are they even still around? How did they ever make money in the first place? Acclaim was better and now they're gone. Hopefully THQ will be next.

[thesoftware6180]

Darksiders, wrestling and saints row keeps them afloat. That tablet drawing thing did great on wii. They should have never put out the 360 or ps3 versions, hardcore gamers were not gonna spend money, $80 I think, to draw. that's where huge losses were made.

[justin_credible]

Originally Posted by Joe Redifer

THQ is shit. Who cares what they do? Why are they even still around? How did they ever make money in the first place? Acclaim was better and now they're gone. Hopefully THQ will be next.

Acclaim had been pretty shit for a long time.

[eastx]

Good and bad news about the Wii U's power

[Joe Redifer]

The text from the above linked article:

The Wii U is significantly more powerful than the Wii or the GameCube before it, but Nintendo's next console doesn't appear to radically surpass the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, according to conversations we've had with people familiar with the Wii U and the forthcoming consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

But horsepower alone never won anyone a major battle in a console war, so power's not everything. With that in mind, two pieces of news, via Go Nintendo, add a little more clarity about the potency of Nintendo's machine.

From an interview with Epic Games' Mark Rein that ran on VideoGamer.com, we get this comment about the Unreal Engine 4, the new Epic graphics engine intended to run games for next-gen consoles like the follow-up to the Xbox 360:

Rein: "I'll state that I don't think it's our intention to bring Unreal Engine 4 to Wii U, but Unreal Engine 4 is going to be supremely scalable.

"We'll run on mobile phones and on a wide variety of things, so if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could. But Unreal Engine 3 is a really good fit for that platform."

That's the good news, which appears to rule out first-run Wii U games from being made on UE4, but keeps Epic on message with the idea that the engine will not inherently block a game made for UE4 from running on Nintendo's device or any other non-optimized hardware.

The not-as-wonderful news comes from Namco's chief game designer of all things Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada, who puts on-record information about Nintendo holding back the Wii U's CPU that we reported here on Kotaku last month, though cited to one of our own inside sources.

This is from a Nintendo Gamer interview with Harada about Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is being made for Wii U:

NG: How has it been developing for the Wii U? Is it a relatively easy system to develop on?

KH: The first thing we don't really know at the moment is the release date of the hardware itself, then we'd be able to release more information about our game in particular. Regarding the hardware, the graphical processing capability is not bad at all. We're actually able to do pretty much what we want in that regard. The one thing where we do kind of have to put our heads to good use is with the CPU itself – I guess because they're trying to keep energy consumption pretty low we really do need to come up with some unique ideas to make good use of the CPU in order to attain the goals we need to for the game

Again, it's important to remember that the Wii trounced its more powerful competitors, the Xbox 360 and PS3. But it's also worth keeping things like the above statements in mind when pondering the notion that the Wii U, which has PS3/360 games like Assassin's Creed III and Mass Effect 3 announced for it, will be able to run the games of the next generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles.

[Alucard]

Weaker than a 360. I could go in so many directions with that. None of them flattering.

[Icarus4578]

Wrong Alucard. According to this article, it's only slightly more powerful than the current gen. Harada's contention is with the fact that while the Wii U can handle all the 360/PS3 ports (which, incidentally, are past-tense), it will not fare so well when trying to port true next-gen softs.

Basically it will be a repeat situation of the Wii vs 360/PS3, and while they're correct in that the Wii sold bucketloads, it was Nintendo's own software that sold on the platform while the vast majority of third-party softs hardly made a dent. So that's definitely a concern looking forward. Devs will likely test the waters for about a year before shifting emphasis back over to MS and Sony. Again, just like this gen.