Bethesda believes that Nintendo has run out of time for convincing publishers and developers to support the Wii U. Vice President of PR and marketing Pete Hines believes that Nintendo should be mounting a better effort to make sure third parties are pleased and have a good idea of what functions a console will perform before it is released.
“But they involved us very early on, and talking to folks like Bethesda and Gearbox, they say ‘here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re planning, here’s how we think it’s going to work’ to hear what we thought – from our tech guys and from an experience standpoint. You have to spend an unbelievable amount of time upfront doing that. If you’re just going sort off deciding ‘we’re going to make a box and this is how it works and you should make games for it.’ Well, no. No is my answer, I’m going to focus on other ones that better support what it is we’re trying to do.”
Nintendo seems to be of the “if you build it, they will come” mindset when it comes to third party developers, which Hines says is the wrong approach. He goes on to further elaborate on how both Sony and Microsoft work at courting third-party developers to make sure they’re happy with everything that’s been outlined in the plans for a console, as well as taking input from these developers for the design of the system and its software.
