Nintendo hoping that Wii U will receive exclusives
This information comes from Nintendo’s UK marketing manager Rob Lowe…
“It’s absolutely fundamental to the success of Wii U to have better third party support than we’ve had in the past for our previous consoles. I think Mr Iwata totally recognises that. That’s why we had a Ubisoft round table session [during E3], that’s why John Ricitiello was on stage at our conference. And even at a local level we’re doing everything we can to support third parties much more than we have done in the past. It goes all the way through the company, from Nintendo Japan, to Nintendo Europe, to Nintendo UK. It’s very different for us to act like that because traditionally we would invest our time and money more into first party. We have a sightly different business model to Microsoft and Sony, who will obviously invest more money or marketing support in third party titles. It’s almost the opposite for us but I think we realise now we have to invest in a much bigger way in third party partners because there are certain types of games that we’re just not specialists at. If we want to create a console that will appeal across boundaries to all different types of gamers we’re going to need their support more than ever before. We’re hoping we’ll get a lot of exclusives as well because of the unique way the console is made. It is much easier for third parties to move their products across from Xbox 360 and PS3 to Wii U. However, the way that the controller has to make you think and make the developers think will hopefully mean that titles that are ported over will hopefully have individual features that aren’t on the other systems.”
You have to like how Nintendo is getting involved with third-parties so far. They’re publishing LEGO City Stories, had EA speak at their E3 conference, and had a roundtable at the show with Ubisoft. And there are also some amazing experiences on the way from outside companies. Having said that, I wonder how long third-parties will stick around if they start seeing poor sales for the hardcore titles they’re pushing out on the Wii U.
