No yearly F1 releases on Wii U, audience is a factor
F1 games have been coming out yearly on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. It doesn’t sound like the Wii U will be receiving the same treatment, however.
Game director Paul Jeal feels that F1 Race Stars may be a more appropriate title to bring to the console. Following this, Codemasters will consider a strategy different from its usual annual games on Wii U.
“We have the license for a bit longer now so we can do a bit more forward planning. Rod [Cousens] – our CEO who’s here [at gamescom] – he’s constantly thinking, ‘What about this or what about that?’, so he needs to put a business case for it. I definitely think it would be something a little more suited to Race Stars first. Let them do the hard work of getting it working on the tech first!”
Jeal said the following when asked whether that would be due to the audience:
“I think so, yeah. I also think it’s looking at the Wii SKU that we did. It did really well but there’s still questions with sales numbers… whether it is something that annually we could revisit year-on-year [and] would sell the same number of units year on year. [For] something like football, you need the newest content and there’s lots of changes, but with F1 the changes with the teams and drivers are really quite minimal, so instantly you’re quite stretched for new content. I think when you bring this over to the Wii where the audience is perhaps a bit more more casual and they’re less likely to buy it year-on-year, you have to look at a slightly different strategy.”
