Trent Oster, co-founder of Beamdog, revealed that his company would not work with Nintendo again, citing difficulties with Nintendo"s policies regarding its digital distribution platform. This would mean that the upcoming Baldur"s Gate: Enhanced Edition - which is being developed by Overhaul Games, a division of Beamdog - will not be released on the Nintendo Wii U system.
"We don"t do Nintendo development. Our previous experience with Nintendo was enough to ensure there will not be another," reads Oster"s tweet, directly in response to a Twitter user asking about a Wii U version of the Baldur"s Gate remake, which is being released on Windows, Mac OS X, and iPad. Oster then explained further: "My problems with Nintendo are: requiring 6000 unit sales before payment, a certification process that took us 9 months and a 40mb limit."
The previous experience with Nintendo was the WiiWare version of MDK 2, which was originally released on Dreamcast and PC, and ported to Wii by Beamdog. Speaking with Joystiq, Oster explained that his team downsized MDK 2 from its original ~400MB size down to Nintendo"s miniscule 40MB requirement, which sounds like something of a minor miracle. However, the game then spent nine months in certification with Nintendo, with Beamdog waiting up to two weeks each time Nintendo tested a bug fix.
On top of all this, Oster says that his company has yet to receive a payment from Nintendo, because WiiWare policies dictate that developers must sell 6,000 units of a game before getting paid. MDK 2 seemingly failed to reach this threshold, meaning Beamdog didn"t earn a cent for its efforts. Oster said "the game was quickly lost in the WiiWare store," despite hiring a PR firm.
Oster went on to call the Wii a toy on Twitter, blaming what he called an exceptionally low attach rate. "You buy a Wii, Wii sports [sic] and never buy another game," he said. "Bad for devs."