In a lengthy exposé published on Eurogamer an anonymous “respected third-party creator” who worked on an unnamed Wii U game has detailed the apparently difficult process of developing said game for the console.

“ [W]e were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems.

The piece, which begins back when the hardware was first revealed to selected developers, unsurprisingly explains “quiet alarm bells started to ring” when it became apparent a small footprint and low noise were a focus, and low power consumption was “more important to the overall design goals” than the machine’s actual raw performance. It also contains several criticisms concerning Nintendo’s development tools (claiming the Wii U “seemed to be trying at every turn to make it difficult to compile and run any code”) and describes communication difficulties that would result in week-long delays in having questions answered by the system’s developers in Japan.Most interestingly the piece contains some candid insight into Nintendo’s approach to its network infrastructure.“We had the basics so we could at least do some testing and connect multiple kits together,” writes the developer, “but a lot of the Mii and friends content was missing and there was no way to test how the existing code would behave in a ‘retail environment’ as there was no retail ‘flash’ for the development kits. We had to code it all in the dark and just hope that it worked.”Here the developer explains a phone conference with “some more senior people at Nintendo.”“The discussion started off well enough and covered off our experiences with the hardware and (slow) toolchain and then we steered them towards discussing when the online features might be available,” the developer writes. “We were told that the features, and the OS updates to support them, would be available before the hardware launch, but only just. There were apparently issues with setting up a large networking infrastructure to rival Sony and Microsoft that they hadn't envisaged.”The unnamed game was “generally well-received” but the developer concedes that , based on sales figures, “we would be lucky to make back all the money that we had invested in making the game in the first place, and although the management publicly supported the Wii U platform, it is unlikely that we would ever release another Wii U title.”

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