Wii Sports designer Katsuya Eguchi said in an interview with Edge that Nintendo, unlike so many previous years, is hoping to see a lot of third party support for the Wii U. He says Nintendo will provide them with technical support and also ideas on how to make games for the Wii U hardware, but he hoped the third parties are open to hearing Nintendo out and what they suggest.

Of course we’ll support them technically, giving any development assistance they require, but each third party has their proven franchises – the franchises that have done really well for them,” Eguchi said.

“I’m hoping they’ll be open to hearing suggestions – ideas from Nintendo on how to really take advantage of the Wii U’s features and offer the public maybe a different spin on those already proven franchises.”

Eguchi said that Nintendo itself is looking at Wii U in a different light than how they saw their consoles previously. “Of course, with those fan-favourite IPs, we’ll continue to offer games based on those characters, in those worlds, with the Wii U. but if there are opportunities for us to come up with new iPs that work well with this new system we’ll jump on those as well.”

evelopers and publishers like Epic, Ubisoft and EA have already expressed their interest in the Wii U. Others like BioWare are not so confident right now.

Unlike the Wii, and the GCN, and the N64, Nintendo is actually looking to have strong third party support for the Wii U. “We think it very important to make several hits from the third-party software publishers within the first year from the release of the platform, while offering Nintendo software seamlessly,” Satoru Iwata, Nintendo boss, said in a recent shareholders meeting.

“In order to achieve this goal, we have shared information about the new hardware with the software publishers earlier than we did previously and built a cooperative structure, and we are developing several titles in collaboration with these publishers.

“I cannot talk in detail about the names of the titles, or with which publishers we are currently collaborating, because we have not announced this information yet, but what we are aiming for with the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U is, platforms which have much more software and a wider variety of software than the former Nintendo DS or Wii.

“Therefore, we are thinking of creating an environment where software from other companies will become hits.”

“[We’re] prepared to invest in order to make this a reality,’ he concluded. Wow, to say “third party support” and “Nintendo” in the same sentence sounds kind of strange, but by the looks of it, this might actually happen.