Dev: Wii U Comes off Badly When Compared Against PS4/XO, Porting Next-Gen Titles Just Doesn’t Work

A third party developer talked about the Wii U. Particularly, how certain parts excelled over the previous generation but how ultimately, it’s unable to match up to the PS4 and Xbox One.

“Parts of the hardware run better than the previous generation, but other parts drag it down. If you tried to compare the Wii U against the PS4/XO, it comes off very badly indeed – it just cannot compete with the new consoles.”

It also doesn’t help that the lower tier technology prevents porting of next gen titles over to the Wii U, despite some similarities in architecture to the Xbox One and PS4. “There are some fleeting parallels between Wii U and the next-gen consoles – the combination of a low-power CPU with a much more powerful graphics chip – but the notion of next-gen titles being easily portable to the Wii U just doesn’t work. The gulf in power is just too high, while the GPGPU that we’ll see on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 isn’t compatible with the older shader model four hardware found in the Wii U,” the developer said in the latest feature of Secret Developers on Digital Foundry.

With Nintendo projecting $335 million in losses due to the Wii U and stocks diving 18 percent for the company at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, what do you make of the developer’s words when it comes to competing with the PS4 and Xbox One? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.