Missing out on Bethesda's Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles was surely a big disappointment for Nintendo, and the fact that future Bethesda titles, like Wolfenstein: The New Order or The Elder Scrolls Online, aren't releasing on the Wii U, surely isn't helping Nintendo.
So what gives, why is the developer (and so many others) passing on Nintendo?
Well, straight from the proverbial horse's mouth, Bethesda's VP of head of PR, Pete Hines, explained the company's logic in an episode of GameTrailers' Bonus Round. Transcribed by Gimme Gimme Games, Hines said, "The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long past. The box is out," he said.
"You have to do what Sony and Microsoft have been doing with us for a long time and it's not that every time we met with them we got all the answers we wanted. 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."
Hines said platform holders need to "spend an unbelievable amount of time upfront" talking with developers so that a given piece of hardware meets the needs of content producers - or they just won't be interested.
"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," he said. "I'm going to focus on other ones that better support what it is we're trying to do. So you've gotta spend more time trying to reach out to those folks before you even make the box, when you're still designing and thinking about how it's going to work."
Until Nintendo makes this effort, the company stands to lose out on games from Bethesda, and even more developers.
Hines' latest words echo an early August interview with Joystiq, where he said that the Bethesda's reasons for not releasing game's for Nintendo's Wii U was "largely a hardware thing," and that as of now the company's primary focus is to "make the games that we want to make, on whatever platforms will support them as developed."
"None of the game's we've announced are being developed for the Wii U, so it's guaranteed that none of those games are coming to Wii U...Will any future ones come out? I can't say for sure, in our near-term focus it's not on our radar."
