*Rumor* Final Wii U Dev Kits released

Idea Man has been at it again, this time letting the rumor fly that final dev kits are being mass produced for Wii U Third Party developers. Here is what he said:

"One month and half ago, i told you that big third-parties were noticed by Nintendo that they should receive the development kits following the V4 ones that they used since late last year/start of january, at the end of march/beginning of april. These "V5" dev kits seemed to be tagged final or near final, and see a slight increase in their performances.


Nearly all this post's infos are STILL relevant, except the time schedule. It appears third-parties were waiting for these dev kits during all april. There has been a delay of at least one month in the supply of this equipment by Nintendo.

But finally, they just received them

Another important news: they are the mass produced dev kits.


Here's some bits of my previous message in regard to this subject, but updated:

- Except maybe big japanese studios (like Capcom), i doubt that other third-parties received these dev kits (much) earlier. It's likely that my sources are one of the firsts to be granted of the latest revisions. This means that all the declarations, the news, from foreign developers, that you've read until now, were certainly in a V4 dev kit framework, before the release of these newest ones.

- A previous post of lherre indicated that Nintendo guys were testing an engine and saw slightly improved results on the "V5" compare to V4.
Context: it was posted 2 month and half ago, when lherre decided to come out of his lair in answer to my very first message to confirm that Wii U was clearly closer to "2x than 5x xbox360". And he basically added that the expected more advanced dev kit in Nintendo headquarters at the time that i've talked about will not change dramatically the Wii U power status. So he surely knew of these engine benchmarks before my intervention, maybe some days, maybe some weeks.
Assumption: considering the at least 3 months interval between these internal tests and the V5 delivery to third-parties (minus the dev kits assembly and shipping), there's a good chance that the V5 dev kits in the hands of foreign studios have received even more hardware refinements and optimizations than the models used for these Nintendo tests some time before. 


Additional infos:

- Third-parties have one month to adapt to these new dev kits and to what they bring (in terms of performances increase, hardware modifications, and new features) until E3.
- As they are tagged "Mass Production", they are final. Maybe there will be later revisions with small refinements here and there, but nothing drastic, except changes of plans from Nintendo. So the hardware is stable now.
- One of the dev kit aspect (in comparison to the v4 ones) is... original
- Teasing part: besides possible improvement of the system power (slight to moderate though), there is at least one additional good news that come with them. It's not necessarily the obvious ones"


Link

Idea Man has been right on the money thus far and believe me, posting this information is much more interesting to me than posting what Nintendo "should" do at E3 like some other sites.