Next gen EA games will skip the Wii U due to Frostbite Engine

[DSGamer64]

http://investor.ea.com/releases.cfm?ReleasesType=Earnings

That is all.

What does that have to do with Sim City sales? Nothing, that is what.

 

[Foxi4]

What does that have to do with Sim City sales? Nothing, that is what.

It directly contradicts what you've said - EA is (and was) consistently making money on their products.

 

[DSGamer64]

It directly contradicts what you've said - EA is (and was) consistently making money on their products.

I was talking about SimCity you knob, not about their other products. We all know people are sheep for Battlefield and Fifa. A million copies is a low return for a game that runs online and requires server maintenance.

 

[Foxi4]

I was talking about SimCity you knob, not about their other products. We all know people are sheep for Battlefield and Fifa. A million copies is a low return for a game that runs online and requires server maintenance.

Calm down.

 

[tronic307]

Look, EA is full of shit. It's not about engines, and if UbiSoft's uPlay can run on Wii U, why can't Origin, as long as Nintendo gets their cut?
EA games just don't appeal to Nintendo fans. If they did, why hasn't a single one of their titles cracked 50k on Wii U? I can't blame EA for cutting their losses and it's honestly no loss to anyone.
What does it take to reclaim the hardcore? You have to be willing to take massive losses on advanced hardware that's a veritable developer's playground, not adequate hardware that's easy for Nintendo to develop on.
Nintendo still sees third parties as competition, apparently, even though they make the bulk of their profits from licensing fees. Nintendo should just massively ramp up their development facilities and be fully prepared to support their hardware on their own.

 

[FAST6191]

Look, EA is full of shit. It's not about engines, and if UbiSoft's uPlay can run on Wii U, why can't Origin, as long as Nintendo gets their cut?

Given time, money and the effort of coders (not a limitless resource) then maybe. However if the engine would take ages to port when the resources could be better used, not be very extensible once it gets there (though I can buy an off the shelf engine I can expect to spend the time customising it), not be very easy to maintain (just because it is an "unreal engine 3" title do not for a moment assume that it is the same unreal engine 3 that came out 3 years earlier) and not have a terribly bright future (the Wii U is struggling and set to be underpowered in the near future) then perhaps not so much. To that end given many people do not understand programming and programming from an enterprise perspective especially then "we can't make it work" is not a lie.

EA games just don't appeal to Nintendo fans. If they did, why hasn't a single one of their titles cracked 50k on Wii U? I can't blame EA for cutting their losses and it's honestly no loss to anyone.

I do not have a good list of all EA funded Wii U titles but if games are mainly sold in the first 6 months of their life then what EA games that are not sports games would seem to have come out several months later when people that wanted to play them probably had ample chance to do so. Equally it is not like EA put out many games of astounding quality last year.

 

[The Milkman]

Look, EA is full of shit. It's not about engines, and if UbiSoft's uPlay can run on Wii U, why can't Origin, as long as Nintendo gets their cut?
EA games just don't appeal to Nintendo fans. If they did, why hasn't a single one of their titles cracked 50k on Wii U? I can't blame EA for cutting their losses and it's honestly no loss to anyone.

Has the Wii U itself even broken past a couple million? Also, most of the games they PUT on the Wii U have just been ports or "enhanced" versions. Games you could get on other consoles, which chances are a good amount of Wii U owners have. I doubt this has anything to do with the tastes of Nintendo fans, hell im an Nintendo fan and I have ME:2 and BF3 on my PC.

Even though it was a rumor, I still think this has something to do with Nintendo turning down Origin as their online infrastructure. Till it's been de-bunked I'll keep thinking it too.

 

[tronic307]

Given time, money and the effort of coders (not a limitless resource) then maybe. However if the engine would take ages to port when the resources could be better used, not be very extensible once it gets there (though I can buy an off the shelf engine I can expect to spend the time customising it), not be very easy to maintain (just because it is an "unreal engine 3" title do not for a moment assume that it is the same unreal engine 3 that came out 3 years earlier) and not have a terribly bright future (the Wii U is struggling and set to be underpowered in the near future) then perhaps not so much. To that end given many people do not understand programming and programming from an enterprise perspective especially then "we can't make it work" is not a lie.


I do not have a good list of all EA funded Wii U titles but if games are mainly sold in the first 6 months of their life then what EA games that are not sports games would seem to have come out several months later when people that wanted to play them probably had ample chance to do so. Equally it is not like EA put out many games of astounding quality last year.

I'm sorry, I was referring to the rumored Origin digital game store debacle between EA and Nintendo, not the Frostbite3 game engine. Even if the Wii U could support the engine, there is no financial incentive for EA to port it. EA saying that the Wii U can't run it might give the matter some closure and cut down on port begging.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

I'm sorry, I was referring to the rumored Origin digital game store debacle between EA and Nintendo, not the Frostbite3 game engine. Even if the Wii U could support the engine, there is no financial incentive for EA to port it. EA saying that the Wii U can't run it might give the matter some closure and cut down on port begging.

I don't buy the "Frostbite3 engine not being able to run on the WiiU". The WiiU is stronger than the 360 and PS3... and yet those consoles are getting it? That just seems shady to me.

 

[Foxi4]

I don't buy the "Frostbite3 engine not being able to run on the WiiU". The WiiU is stronger than the 360 and PS3... and yet those consoles are getting it? That just seems shady to me.

Again, numbers showing the computing power of those systems are not a representation of what they can or can't do - the SDK may be lacking some functionality crucial for Frostbite 3's operation, making porting either impossible (if there is no workaround) or at least costly (if there is a workaround, but it requires SDK modification). We don't know that and as much as it seems unbelievable, we don't have anything to prove that it's not the case.

 

[tronic307]

I don't buy the "Frostbite3 engine not being able to run on the WiiU". The WiiU is stronger than the 360 and PS3... and yet those consoles are getting it? That just seems shady to me.

I don't buy that either, but the Wii U is not clearly superior to the previous HD consoles.
It has much more RAM and the GPU is generations ahead of the others, but only 60% of the memory bandwidth and CPU floating point performance is lacking in comparison. The CPU is like three Wii cores with SMP, more cache and a 70% clock speed increase. There is no SIMD, or vector processing; 64-bit floating point is achieved by pairing two 32-bit instructions, just like the Wii and GC.
All things considered, we wind up with a game console that is in the same class as PS3 and Xbox360; better in many ways but worse in others.
I don't think that it's anything that would scare developers off, though. Need for Speed Most Wanted for the Wii U looked nearly as good as the PC version, and better side-by-side than PS360. The game even got great reviews but only managed to sell 10k in North America, 10k in Europe, and likely only hundreds in Japan, as there is not enough sales data to register on VGChartz.
I doubt EA made their money back on that one. I agree that this is political bullshit, but you also have to take demographics into consideration.

 

[BenRK]

I tried reading this, but all I got out of it was "We're to lazy to get a Wii U port of our engine working cause we don't want to put in any effort and keep pumping out the same set of games year after year."

 

[Foxi4]

There's no reason for anyone to be ninbuttset* due to a video game publisher making a logically sound decision.





*Nintendo Butthurt Upset

 

[Guild McCommunist]

I literally think people would get less anally frustrated if EA just said "We're not developing for the Wii U because it's fucking terrible" than giving an actual excuse as to why they won't do it.

 

[TripleSMoon]

I literally think people would get less anally frustrated if EA just said "We're not developing for the Wii U because it's fucking terrible" than giving an actual excuse as to why they won't do it.

I agree, actually.

 

[JoostinOnline]

I literally think people would get less anally frustrated if EA just said "We're not developing for the Wii U because it's fucking terrible" than giving an actual excuse as to why they won't do it.

Or if people believed that was the real reason.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Or if people believed that was the real reason.

Well people here are saying that the device not being "up to standards" isn't the case because a few internet geniuses obviously know more about the internal workings of the machine than professional video game developers.

 

[Foxi4]

Well people here are saying that the device not being "up to standards" isn't the case because a few internet geniuses obviously know more about the internal workings of the machine than professional video game developers.

...and hackers who hacked the device and see no point in further elaborating on their findings because three Wii's strapped together and overclocked with some added RAM and a newer GPU are not exactly good prospects for homebrew anyways.

 

[JoostinOnline]

Well people here are saying that the device not being "up to standards" isn't the case because a few internet geniuses obviously know more about the internal workings of the machine than professional video game developers.

1) It's more than a few, and there are quite a number of reputable sources which say otherwise. When reputable sources say different things, people will obviously side with the option they want to be true.
2) We know that EA intentionally prevented Crysis 3 from being developed on the Wii U, so it's easy to mistrust them.

 

[ShadowSoldier]

Well people here are saying that the device not being "up to standards" isn't the case because a few internet geniuses obviously know more about the internal workings of the machine than professional video game developers.

Except when other developers, who are not as large as EA make games for it...

Like I said, it doesn't make sense as to why games like Battlefield 4 or fuck, even NHL or Madden won't come to the system, but will still come to the PS3... something just doesn't add up. Ok, give EA the benefit of the doubt for Battlefield 4, and we'll ignore that it's coming to the PS3 and 360 (although the WiiU can and has proven that it can do better than those consoles (need for speed being a prime example), NHL and Madden are definitely not that graphic heavy or anything, and they really don't look any better than their predecessors from 2006/07. Iono, it just doesn't make sense at all. And I'm sticking with that.