Unity on Wii?

With rumors going on for months on the console new sites, that the Wii DevKit costs a mere $2,000, it has made me think...

http://xboxmeagain.blogspot.com/2006/02/2000-for-revolution-development-kit.html

Could Unity possibly be able to create a Wii compatible distribution? Have any developers considered this idea?

This would really give independant game developers that extra push to get them on the console market.

 

I personally would love to develop a game for the Wii. I don't know if it is a high priority for OTEE though. Maybe when the big N starts talking about the virtual console for indie developers, there might be an interest for adding such features. As a sidenote, the Gamecube was a custom PowerPC chip, and I think the Wii's is too.

 

So is Xbox360. Heh.


Intel Macs and PPC XBOX! MADNESS!

 

Wii, PS3, and XBox 360 are all PowerPC variants (the PS3 being the most exotic).

I wouldn't hold my breath for Unity to support Wii unless they start charging $25000 or more per license. It's *hard* to become a Nintendo developer so the customer base is small and hence the price they'll need to charge customers is high.

PS3 is going to support Linux, so it might be the most viable target platform. I don't know how open the XBox 360 development platform is, especially for downloadable stuff. And Nintendo might be more open to Wii development than my past experience...

But here's the basic point: OTEE presumably wants to run at a profit. Developing stuff costs money. To make a profit you need to expect to get a larger amount of money from customers than you spend on development. The game developer market is small to start with... Imagine it takes 1 programmer year to port the Unity runtime to Wii... That's (a) $100,000 in cash (guesstimate, but actually a very optimistic one given overheads), and (b) unknown opportunity cost (what else could you do with that programmer year or $100,000?).

 

mind you i'd be happy to pay more (5k or so) if they released a version of Unity for PS3/360/Wii... I think if you made a game worthy enough, and with the large installed base, and the fact that PS3 will support micro-payments I think you could get that money back fairly quickly. I've used a friends 360 live, and I actually had more fun playing the 'shareware' games off live then I did playing the 360 commercial games! except tombraider of course! :wink:

cheers.

 

If you want to see Unity on a console, my suggestion is to get a Unity game published with an up and coming company like Freeverse. Then if it does well enough it could make a port of Unity worthwhile. Money would make it happen, nothing short of it.

A "fairy tale" type story like that is happening at Freeverse right now.

http://news.freeverse.com/archives/001157.php

You might remember Strange Flavour from the ToySight games...

-Jon

 

I have a 360 and I tell you that the Live Arcade is sweet. I enjoy plaing the games off it as much as I enjoy the comercial games. Also the fact you can download and try them out then buy the whole thing makes this a great shareware platform. I would love to see Unity ported to Xbox 360, I'm telling you we could sell Open Fire on there for a few gold points and make a little. Unity could totaly take over Live Arcade.

Unfortinetly torque is already on 360. Corse the only game they have out for it is marbles and it sucks compared to Gooball. So if any of you can make a great game and pay for the port we would all benifit . Jeff

 

If I can make a great games that makes enough then I would be happy to pay for the port