Bethesda: "The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long passed"
"Pick the consoles that have the games you want to play."
Skyrim and Fallout maker Bethesda has gone on the record to say it's not making any games for Nintendo platforms.
Now, one of its senior executives has suggested it may be too late for Nintendo to convince Bethesda - and other publishers - to change its mind.
Speaking on the latest episode of Gametrailers' Bonus Round, Bethesda marketing chief Pete Hines said Nintendo only has itself to blame for the current lack of third-party titles on Wii U because it failed to gain feedback on its plans before the console's November 2012 release.
"The time for convincing publishers and developers to support Wii U has long passed," Hines said.
"The box is out. You have to do what Sony and Microsoft have been doing with us for a long time. It's not that every time we met with them we got all the answers that we wanted, but they involved us very early on, talking to folks like Bethesda and Gearbox, saying, 'Here's what we're doing, here's what we're planning, here's how we think it's going to work,' to hear what we thought, from our tech guys, and from an experience standpoint."
He added: "You have to spend an unbelievable amount of time upfront doing that. If you're going to sort of decide 'Well, we're going to make a box and this is how it's going to work, and you should make games for it,' - well, no! No is my answer!
"I'm going to focus on other ones that better support what it is we're trying to do. You've got to spend more time trying to reach out to those folks before you even make the box when you're still designing it and thinking about how it's going to work."
Both Microsoft and Sony consulted the game industry's key players as it worked on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 respectively. PS4 architect Mark Cerny has discussed at length how the Japanese company was keen to avoid the mistakes it made in the run up to the launch of the PlayStation 3, making its successor much more developer friendly.
Nintendo has struggled to convince third-parties to support Wii U, and, perhaps most damaging, has lost support of mega publisher EA after a short burst of Wii U launch games. Like Bethesda, EA currently has no Nintendo games in development, meaning the likes of Battlefield 4 and FIFA 14 will skip Nintendo's console. Eurogamer investigated the collapse of EA and Nintendo's "unprecedented relationship" in a feature published earlier this year.
It appears Hines' mind is made up.
"Honestly, it's not something I spend a lot of time thinking about," he said.
"Pick the consoles that have the games you want to play. You shouldn't have ever bought a Wii U expecting to play great Bethesda games on there because that's not something we'd ever supported in the past.
"We'll see how that changes down the road - if it does.
"It's more about the hardware and the audience and supporting yet another platform, and does it do everything the way the others do? If not then usually it just doesn't make a lot of sense to spend that much time and attention on something that doesn't fit what you're doing."