Bethesda: It's too late for third-party support on Wii U

"The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long past. The box is out."

- Bethesda vice president Pete Hines says that it's too late for Nintendo to gather third-party support for its Wii U console. Bethesda currently has no plans to release games for the Nintendo Wii U, and when asked on GameTrailer's Bonus Round show whether there's a chance the company will bring games to the Wii U at some point, Hines said, "Honestly, it's not something I spend a lot of time thinking about." The problem, says Hines, is that Nintendo didn't approach third-party developers early enough into the Wii U's development. "You have to do what Sony and Microsoft have been doing with us for a long time," he notes. "It's not that every time we met with them we got all the answers that we wanted, but they involved us very early on, talking to folks like Bethesda and Gearbox, saying, '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." Nintendo did not provide any of this upfront legwork, Hines adds, and as such it was much more difficult for companies like Bethesda to choose to support the console. "You have to spend an unbelieveable amount of time upfront doing that," Hines says. "If you're going to sort of decide 'Well, we're going to make a box and this is how it's going to work, 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. You've got to spend more time trying to reach out to those folks before you even make the box when you're still designing it and thinking about how it's going to work."