This is the second portion of our Wii U analysis and is focused on developers. You can check out first part of the Wii U here-

This is also the third part of the ongoing analysis of consoles this gen. You can get up to date with other parts of the series which can be found in the following links:

Source Data

The data has been collected through days of webscraping to ensure that my endeavour does not result in spamming requests to one of my favorite sites. For the same reason, I will not be sharing the scrapper code.

The analysis below is based on all the games released from 1st November,2013 to 1st June,2017.Although, Wii U launched almost a year earlier, the time frame has been kept as such to have a valid comparison with other consoles. Now off with the analysis.

Classification

The score classification is done as follows:

  • Rated : Titles having minimum number of reviews as per metacritic policy
  • Exceptional: Titles with >=90% Metascore
  • Great: Titles with >=80% Metascore
  • Good: Titles with >=70% Metascore

As you can see, we refrained from categorizing anything lower than 70 because a console is defined by the good games it have.

Top Developers

Starting off with quantity developers. as expected Nintendo leads with 09 rated releases with 3 of them breaking the barrier of 90.

No other developer in Top 5 managed a single Exceptional release. In fact, other than TT Games of Lego fame, all others are small or indie outfits.

Other than Nintendo, no other quantity developers managed a single exceptional title

Moving to quality, Nintendo leads with 03 Exceptional releases again proving that it was largely an one developer show in Wii-U.

Only three other developers managing an exceptional releases- Bandai Namco Games with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U,DrinkBox Studios with Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition and the excellent PlatinumGames with Bayonetta 2.

Five of these releases were Nintendo exclusives going to show lack of excellent games from 3rd party developers.

Five out of Six exceptional releases were Nintendo exclusives going on to show lack of excellent multi-platform titles

Lowering down to great releases or better, it is again all Nintendo Show. They managed 07 Great or better titles with no other developer managing more than two.

Nintendo tried to run a console single-handedly.But in this day and age, one-developer show is not sufficient enough to sustain a console over a generation

Developer Rating

When it comes to consistency, small or indie developers like Drinkbox of Guacamelee fame leads with Steamworld developers Image & Form and Yacht Club Games of Shovel Knight fame not far behind.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo averaged 84.8 critic score with 09 different releases. Whatever you say about their platform, their pedigree as quality quantity developer is simply unmatchable.

Nintendo averaged 84.8 critic score with 09 different releases. Whatever you say about their platform, their pedigree as quality quantity developer is simply unmatchable.

Same story in terms of user appreciation. Nintendo scored average 8.4 with 11 user rated releases. Yacht Club and Platinum Games leads as the most beloved developers on Wii U.

Nintendo scored average 8.4 with 11 user rated releases

That’s it and it concludes the consoles analysis. Planning to do one for PC considering the same time period within a week or two. Stay tuned or subscribe to have instant updates on new posts.

If you like this post and want to keep up with rest of the series, you can find previous entries here: