There’s no official announcement or commitment yet, but sources say that Gearbox has been eyeing the Wii U in advance of its launch of Borderlands 2. The developer’s chief creative officer, Brian Martel, has told dealspwn.com in an interview exactly why the publisher (THQ) has been hesitant thus far, when looking at the game and platform from a business perspective:
“We really like the Wii U. I think it’s a really cool platform. I like what they’re doing — obviously with the touchscreen — and it will be interesting to see what Microsoft do with their approach to that idea. It’s one of those problems of the Wii: the only people who have ever made a lot of money on the Wii is Nintendo.
So we’re really excited to bring Aliens: Colonial Marines to it. And we’re going to do a wait and see approach, our publisher 2K is going to see whether they’re going to go with that.
If Borderlands 2 was on the Wii U, the thing I would be most excited about is inventory management: it would be amazing on that, it would just be fantastic. And I think the artwork would look really good, with the way they can deal with the resolutions and textures, I think it’s a really good console.”
This isn’t really a surprise, since the reaction from developers has been mixed since the announcement of the Wii U, and it seems that many studios’ left hands don’t know what their right hands are doing. At the very least, Gearbox has been a vocal supporter of the console for quite some time, which is a promising note for the future of their games on Nintendo products.
Doubtless the amount of third-party games on the console will depend on the success of the Wii U’s launch… but will there be enough content on launch as a result, in order to make the console successful enough in the eyes of these developers? Time will tell.
