Gaming Why was Minecraft never released for Wii?

[The Real Jdbye]

Well, I have an explanation about why Minecraft never launched for Wii, the independent Mojang AB game never released its Minecraft game for the revolutionary Nintendo console, Wii.

Since that game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 but not for Wii, maybe because Nintendo does not want Minecraft in its seventh generation console, Wii or it would be that the Wii was not powerful enough to generate Random Chunks and support an Infinite World as is Minecraft.

Discuss and explain the reasons why Minecraft never launched for Wii.

It definitely isn't powerful enough. It might be able to run something like Minecraft Classic, and in fact there was a homebrew attempt to create something like it in the form of WiiCraft. From memory it ran fairly well but it obviously wasn't anywhere near current Minecraft in terms of features. You could place blocks, and destroy blocks, and that was basically it.

Minecraft takes up quite a lot of RAM in order to store loaded chunks, entities and other things, and the Wii only has 88MB total across the CPU and GPU. Also, the mobile version of Minecraft might run fine on mobile now, but when Minecraft PE was new, I remember performance not being all that great (although playable) - and the Wii (at least to my knowledge) is weaker than even the mobile phones of that time, nevermind the low amount of RAM.

Porting PE to the Wii and having it run at a playable framerate would likely require sacrificing some features in order to improve performance enough, which obviously wouldn't be ideal since no one would want to play an inferior version of Minecraft if they had a choice. (Though PE at the time it was new was still very inferior to the desktop version, it was all you had on the go and it was good enough for a mobile game, on the Wii it wouldn't have that excuse - and in this case the mobile version would probably be better than the Wii one anyway)

Minecraft might look like it shouldn't take much power to run, after all the graphics fidelity is most akin to Doom and that even ran on the SNES way back (but of course the world is much bigger, Doom had pretty small levels with enclosed hallways so only a small part of them needed to be rendered at a time)
And in fact, I'm not entirely sure why it takes as much power to run as it does. Games with more polygons in a smaller area and higher resolution textures run better on lesser hardware. The fact that it's just on a bigger scale shouldn't make it perform worse in my head, if less polygons are drawn at a time. But I guess it's not as simple as that, and there's probably more to it I'm just not considering. 3D game development isn't exactly my strong suit.

Here's a few reasons:

- The first Nintendo console release was in late 2015 - the Wii U Edition. At that point, the Wii wasn't relevant anymore.
- Most releases of Minecraft launch digitally first, before getting a physical release. Any sort of digital release would be infeasible on the Wii - official WiiWare had a 40MB limit, something Minecraft would be well over.
- EDIT: Oh, and a physical version wouldn't get any updates either.
- The Wii just isn't too powerful compared to last-gen consoles. There's a good reason it didn't get most AAA titles of the era.

So if you were Microsoft/Mojang, and you were planning to release Minecraft on Nintendo consoles, I don't think you'd be releasing a low-quality, physical-only version on an old discontinued system.

Point 1 here isn't especially relevant, obviously it wouldn't launch on both the Wii and Wii U at the same time or launch on the Wii after the Wii U, but that's not really what this is about - it could have gotten a port to Wii long before then.
2 and 3 are valid points though, but those are software limitations, something Nintendo could have changed if they really wanted to. Hardware limitations are the first roadblock here, and one they would likely never be able to overcome, so the other issues don't really matter in the end.
If there was really a demand for Nintendo to add support for game updates, or increase the allowed size of NAND games, they may have done so. In all likelihood not, because it's Nintendo and they rarely listen to what people want. But the Wii wasn't able to run most of the games that existed on other platforms at the time, so it was never really a talking point.

 

[smileyhead]

The New 3DS is more powerful than the Wii.

It's not.

Yes it is.

 

[Extrems]

Yes it is.

Do you know how those cores actually perform? A GameCube beats it in single core performance, and a Wii is nominally 1.5x as fast (more with bus pipeline enhancements).

This isn't even considering floating-point performance, the Wii wipes the floor then. 1 core is also reserved for the 3DS' OS.

The 3DS' GPU has a edge here for having geometry shaders, but the Wii has much stronger pixel shader capability than people credit it for.

RAM is a bit of a pain point as it's also non-uniform and non-contiguous, but I don't think this is an insurmountable issue.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Yes it is.

You're using GameFAQs as a source? Really?
That thread is filled with inaccurate information. But more than that, the two systems are really difficult to compare by specs because of the widely different architectures.

CPU wise I think there's little doubt the n3DS would win, even if it's weaker clock by clock (which I think is likely), it has 4 times as many cores. But GPU wise, it's a bit unclear and so it might end up a wash overall.

I have seen the 3DS pull off some graphics I thought were impressive for the time (for a handheld anyway), but it's on a much smaller screen so imperfections are obviously less visible. Meanwhile Wii games that used to look great on a CRT and that I was impressed by such as the Zeldas and Marios don't look so good on a modern big-screen HDTV, but again, screen size makes a big difference here. It's not easy to do an apples to apples comparison just based on visual inspection and specs alone.

You could compile some sort of benchmark for both, but the graphics interface is different as well so you wouldn't be able to have the same code running on both. As well as the resolution being different (but you could render a 400x240 image on a Wii so that one's easy to work around)
That would probably be the best way to feasibly compare the two. But depending on what the benchmark is testing specifically, the results could be skewed in favor of one or the other as they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

In the end I would still consider this an open-ended question.

 

[Hielkenator2]

It's not.

Yes it is, 3ds is dual core, the Wii single core

 

[Extrems]

Yes it is, 3ds is dual core, the Wii single core

This is New 3DS (804 MHz quad core), but the Wii's single core can do as much work as two New 3DS cores.

 

[Coto]

Yes it is.

actually the New3DS CPU arquitecture is built around power saving features, where the Wii doesn't. That alone means the Wii can outperform 1 or even two New3DS cores on raw integer decoding (also having way more registers to spare means less context switches). The new 3DS has VFP11 but Wii PowerPC750 has FPU ("paired singles") and over 40 SIMD instructions.


Basically Wii games ported to New 3DS need not to be downgraded if such effects like normal mapping aren't supported. Because the TEV unit on the Wii doesn't do newer shaders (of which PICA200 can do), these must be handled through software. This is where the 3DS/N3DS wins.

On the other hand games that did actually have high polygon count such as Xenoblade, yeah these had to be downgraded because the engine didn't really use much shader features, but rather relied on the huge system's poly power.

As far as emulation goes, I wonder how well GBA emulation does on gamecube vs the 3DS(and N3DS): (exclude virtualization GBA VC because that doesn't really stress the comparison described here)

https://www.gc-forever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3129

oh look, the guy you quoted posted something he actually knows!

 

[Deleted User]

not this again

 

[bomigoton]

Sorry for digging this out again.

For me main reason was RAM:

Wii 88MB RAM +3MB
3ds 128MB RAM +6 MB VRAM
n3ds 256MB RAM +10 MB VRAM
psVita 512MB RAM +128MB VRAM
PS3 256MB +256MB
X360 512MB

Wii and regular 3ds just did not have enogh RAM.
ds had "dscraft" but you could not do much in it.

 

[Captain_N]

The wii has less the 96 megs of ram. Mindcraft uses alot of ram.

 

[TheMrIron2]

The PS3/360 versions could have feasibly been ported. Both PS3 and 360 ran a PowerPC chip at their core. The Wii could even theoretically outdo the PS3 at some operations - the PS3's CPU performance was killed by branches due to its long pipeline and in-order execution, whereas the Wii was a superscalar out-of-order capable of executing - don't quote me - 3 instructions simultaneously?

However:
- the Wii's few CPU advantages do not detract from the fact it was a 729MHz single-core PowerPC thread. Rendering a procedural world on this chip along with the other things Minecraft does would have been a little bit difficult. This is not the biggest problem, however (surprisingly)
- the Wii's RAM is severely limited. With just 64MB of non-contiguous RAM and 24MB for VRAM (88MB in total as people are quoting) the Wii would have had a lot of difficulty.
- the Wii's GPU was positively terrible by comparison, even if Minecraft is not a particularly GPU-intensive game - it would have been another hurdle to port to the Wii's more peculiar GPU architecture.
- the New 3DS comparison is invalid, as even if we assume the N3DS's CPU (which is 10 years newer..) is weaker clock-for-clock and has no modern architectural improvements the fact we are dealing with a quad-core CPU alone makes parallelisation a possibility, smoothing out the load significantly. The N3DS also has much more memory at its disposal in total. It's not an end-all argument to say Minecraft would not run on Wii, but it is at a false equivalency at best because we'll never be able to compare things properly.

There is one important argument to consider, though. The PlayStation Portable recently received an update to its homebrew version of Minecraft, pegging it very close to more recent Minecraft: Pocket Edition versions - and it runs at an unwavering 60FPS. With that in mind, alongside the fact that more demanding 360 titles have been ported to Wii than Minecraft, why must the Wii struggle if the PSP (which is no more powerful than the Wii in almost every aspect) can run a fan version of Minecraft perfectly?

And that's a good question; the problem is no longer that the hardware is completely incapable, but literally every other factor is against the Wii. Minecraft was in its early alpha in 2009, as anyone from the time can remember - it was hardly Minecraft in a sense. The console versions required a complete rewrite from Java to C++ to give them a hope of running the game, and by 2012 the consoles were running Minecraft at 1280x720 at 60FPS. But herein lies the problem - 2012. 2012 was when the Wii U was looming large, and at the time the Wii U was actually quite hyped with launch titles like ZombiU and Assassin's Creed coming from third parties. The Wii had stopped receiving new big-name games, with the exception of usual cash cows like FIFA and Just Dance. There was really no use in porting it to Wii, and the Wii U version was likely held off due to skepticism about the initial launch sales before eventually receiving a release that must have been worked on before in 2015.

Perhaps this video will explain it better than I could.

 

[newo]

As others have mentioned MC is really CPU intensive and when you dont have allot of CPU the next best option is to have allot of RAM to cache stuff (which is what the new consoles are doing nowadays). But getting anything even an average looking MC game with good draw distance is not going to work. UNLESS you are some kinda coding/bit flipping genius. Procedural Generation is definitely possible (https://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Newo_Sky) but even if you are clever the CPU then the RAM definitely constrain your potential.

 

[MyJoyConRunsHot]

It definitely isn't powerful enough. It might be able to run something like Minecraft Classic, and in fact there was a homebrew attempt to create something like it in the form of WiiCraft. From memory it ran fairly well but it obviously wasn't anywhere near current Minecraft in terms of features. You could place blocks, and destroy blocks, and that was basically it.

Minecraft takes up quite a lot of RAM in order to store loaded chunks, entities and other things, and the Wii only has 88MB total across the CPU and GPU. Also, the mobile version of Minecraft might run fine on mobile now, but when Minecraft PE was new, I remember performance not being all that great (although playable) - and the Wii (at least to my knowledge) is weaker than even the mobile phones of that time, nevermind the low amount of RAM.

Porting PE to the Wii and having it run at a playable framerate would likely require sacrificing some features in order to improve performance enough, which obviously wouldn't be ideal since no one would want to play an inferior version of Minecraft if they had a choice. (Though PE at the time it was new was still very inferior to the desktop version, it was all you had on the go and it was good enough for a mobile game, on the Wii it wouldn't have that excuse - and in this case the mobile version would probably be better than the Wii one anyway)

Minecraft might look like it shouldn't take much power to run, after all the graphics fidelity is most akin to Doom and that even ran on the SNES way back (but of course the world is much bigger, Doom had pretty small levels with enclosed hallways so only a small part of them needed to be rendered at a time)
And in fact, I'm not entirely sure why it takes as much power to run as it does. Games with more polygons in a smaller area and higher resolution textures run better on lesser hardware. The fact that it's just on a bigger scale shouldn't make it perform worse in my head, if less polygons are drawn at a time. But I guess it's not as simple as that, and there's probably more to it I'm just not considering. 3D game development isn't exactly my strong suit.

Point 1 here isn't especially relevant, obviously it wouldn't launch on both the Wii and Wii U at the same time or launch on the Wii after the Wii U, but that's not really what this is about - it could have gotten a port to Wii long before then.
2 and 3 are valid points though, but those are software limitations, something Nintendo could have changed if they really wanted to.

Point 2 is a result of hardware limitations (*cough*poor design*cough*). The Wii can read neither games nor save files directly off the SD card, so files have to be small enough to be copied to the internal storage.

Yes, even when you launch wiiware from the SD card menu it creates a temporary copy on the internal storage for the system to read.

 

[DrHouse1337]

It's not.

yeah it is have you not looked at the specs for the "new" 3DS compared to the Wii? Wii: 723Mhz single core PPC CPU, 88MB of ram and a 243Mhz Ati GPU. 3DS: 804Mhz quad core arm CPU, 256 MB of ram (64 MB for OS) and a 204Mhz GPU. While yes the "new" 3DS's GPU is a bit slower then the Wii, the "new" 3DS's CPU was a lot more powerful which Minecraft really needs for randomly generating worlds and on top of that more ram which Minecraft needs.

 

[Deleted User]

Who cares?
Is like pretending to be interested in WHY WAS FORTNITE AND SLENDERMAN NEVER RELEASED FOR THE WII?
WHY CRYSIS WON'T BE ON MY SNES
WHY GOD WHIIIIII

 

[Captain_N]

the wii does not have enough ram for mindcraft. Dispite the graphics, iuses alot of memory. wee has less the 84 megs... I could run but the world would be super small. The large worlds just cant fit in memory.

 

[Braedyn]

Well, I have an explanation about why Minecraft never launched for Wii, the independent Mojang AB game never released its Minecraft game for the revolutionary Nintendo console, Wii.

Since that game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 but not for Wii, maybe because Nintendo does not want Minecraft in its seventh generation console, Wii or it would be that the Wii was not powerful enough to generate Random Chunks and support an Infinite World as is Minecraft.

Discuss and explain the reasons why Minecraft never launched for Wii.

Here is a serious response:
1.The Wii is not capable of making worlds big, if anyway it would only be making 256 x 256 x 256 block worlds.
2.The Wii was dead at the time.
3.The Wii would only be able to handle 1 mob at a time.