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FrozenByte applauds Wii U eShop compared to XBLA/PSN

by rawmeatcowboy
20 December 2012
GN Version 4.0
Technically speaking, the Goblin Menace expansion is not "exclusive" to Wii U as such. It's exclusive as of right now because we haven't had enough resources to look into getting it to XBLA and PSN. The levels in the expansion are quite a bit more demanding than the original campaign, so we're not quite sure if we can squeeze them onto the older consoles properly. We probably could if we did some minor changes to the levels, but that can end up as quite a bit of work... And truth be told we're not very big fans of XBLA nor PSN at the moment, their processes are a bit too heavy to our liking and we also need to go through the XBLA/PSN publisher ATLUS, so it's all a bit more complicated. And frankly there's a big psychological factor as well - We had a very stressful time getting the game onto XBLA and PSN, and we feel like it wasn't really up to us, so we dread having to do that again...

The fact is also that the game works fine on XBLA and PSN at the moment. To get the Goblin Menace released, we'd need to update the game, and we'd need to update it to the very latest version (that's roughly 20 or so updates that we've done on PC, with little regard to consoles - i.e. we didn't want to make any compromises on the outset). There's a huge risk that something goes wrong when we convert the content and updates to the consoles, and we might get stuck in a certification loop that is very costly (see e.g. the Fez situation). PSN might be slightly easier, at least in Europe, but frankly at this point it's all or nothing, because our effort is pretty much the same regardless of the amount of regions it's released in...

January is the timeframe when we'll know our final decision on this. We originally planned to look into this earlier but things have kept busy. If the decision is positive, then we'll have to hope that everyone else involved on the business side also agrees that it's a good idea, and it will go from there.

We know there's a lot of fans waiting for it so we're going to see if it's something we can make happen, but at this point I don't want to sound overly positive... We'll have to wait until January. - FrozenByte team
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