- Third-parties studios are currently receiving (if it’s not the case, it will be very soon) Wii U “bluray” readers, writers, and discs.- They must bring their projects on those Wii U supports at E3 2012. It’s an obligation, by Nintendo. It means the rumors that games could be brought through other means are false (or concerns only a certain type of content, like digital distributed titles).
- There was a delay, like the mass production dev kits, in their arrival. Studios were waiting for this equipment since several weaks.
- They didn’t came with the latest dev kits
- On the contrary to the mass production Wii dev kits (the green ones) that featured a disc drive, the Wii U still don’t have one. The reader is separated.
- No confirmation nor denial of 50GB discs capacity.The Wii U units you’ll see at E3 2012 will include optical drives, and the software demonstrated will be loaded from discs inside those, at least for retail titles.- Wii U games were developed on dev kits linked to a host pc (running the SDK, the development tools, etc.), and it’s possible the access/loading times were emulated, until now, as they will/have received the real support from which the software will be played. Let’s hope this drive will be fast enough.- It’s not uncommon for developers to receive the medias, the storage of a new system rather late in its designing process. But here, the apparent delay is another element that could hint to a certain amount of time spent for either the engineering (physical modifications on the discs ? building of a proprietary file system that took longer ?), the manufacturing (burners, etc.) or the supplying, of these Wii U “bluray”.- Wii and some other consoles have seen their dev kits sizes shrank with each revisions, from the first Wii big box to the last, very smaller (basically, a retail unit, i’m talking proportion wise). For the Wii U, it’s not the case, it seems the mass production dev kits have roughly the same dimensions that the firsts, only the color (and other things) have changed. And as they still don’t feature a disc-drive + as they are tagged final so the components are stable now, it means the internal volume, the heat & cooling situation, are the same as in the first dev kits (with overheat problems, placeholder chips, etc.), but this time with the finished versions.Pure speculation but it could means that even with those really optimized components (maybe smaller chips process, etc.) the coolings needs are such that the dev kits size hasn’t decreased, therefore indicating positive info on the hardware capabilities. It could also be simply explained by a choice of Nintendo to keep the same type of boxes, materials (to save some fabrication costs), and just pimp it quickly to another color and that’s all.- The fact that these latest dev kits aren’t incorporating a drive could means that another revision will launch after, certainly like the Wii green models, designed like the retail console, and with an optical drive this time. But as the recently arrived kits are tagged “mass production”, these hypothetic following models certainly won’t come with extensive hardware changes.