Topic: Disappointed with Nintendo , Wii u

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The games you're talking about are third party games. Games made by other companies and published by other companies. That's a different, bigger conversation that often repeats here at NL. Ultimately, third parties was both a cause and an effect for the failure of the WiiU. At first they promised to bring lots of games to the platform. PS3/X360 games. Things were good. But they were expecting another sales phenomenon like the Wii (which they supported with different software, arguably, lower budget software.) At launch third parties had games, but were generally very late ports, long after the game was clearanced on other platforms, and/or missing features. They didn't sell so well. WiiU actually sold OK at first. But withing months third parties started signalling they were no longer interested and weren't making money. The games dried up fast. Ultimately, internally, they were preparing for PS4/X1, which were to use basic PC architecture, while WiiU still used the architecture of all the prior consoles. WiiU had little hope of ever getting PS4/X1 games, not because of power, but because of the architecture differences. But where for a year or so they were still making PS3/X360 games that would have been compatible, they didn't believe there were enough WiiU buyers for them and never actually made them.

All this is WiiU specific, but Nintendos relationship with 3rd parties has been tenuous since the N64 in 1996. Back in the 80's and early 90's Nintendo was a virtual monopoly in the US and Japan. And they were somewhat nasty to work with as a company....some of their practices determined illegal eventually. Publishers had bad relationships with them. But around the N64 launch, Playstation arrived and pushed the CD optical disc format. Sega joined in as well. And N64 stuck with cartridges. It was a more powerful machine, but with more limited storage space (but much faster storage.) It created a split between the companies and games that went to Nintendo and the ones that went elsewhere. That was where it began that Nintendo games are "different" and the same games from other platforms don't really translate to Nintendo or its customers. GameCube tried to recover and rejoin the "normal" but it failed badly (almost as bad as WiiU.) For Wii they just went totally another way (they had to, but it also further insulated them.)

WiiU....ended up as this weird bridge. They tried bringing back 3rd parties and becoming a normal console again (which didn't work because of PS4/X1 going the way they went) But they also tried holding onto their "new" Wii audience (that ultimately moved to phones), and at the same time tried fusing their console thinking to their handheld thinking with the Gamepad.....but not going all the way with it like Switch. Ultimately it ended up being a really fun little console, but consumers ended up uninterested, 3rd part developers were uninterested, and it kind of just faded. I think Iwata was trying to keep it going as well as possible, at the time, but it was getting to the point, that if they were going to build a lineup for Switch, they couldn't keep developing for WiiU. Zelda being delayed created the opportunity to link the transition between systems to it...and the rest is history.

A game like Resident Evil being ported the question that a company like Square has to ask is: "WiiU has only, at the time, probably 4-6M owners. Sales show that most of the customers primarily buy Nintendo made games and not 3rd party games. And Zombie games are not traditionally very big sellers on Nintendo at all compared to other platforms, which is why we're porting it from 3DS to begin with" It's a pretty easy call to say "no, we're not doing WiiU"

But even with Switch the same issues with 3rd parties exist. So many games COULD come, but many wont, and 3rd parties continue making excuses. To a degree, Nintendo just isn't a healthy environment for companies like EA or Activision to compete.....Nintendo's own games are so dominant, so successful, and because it's a closed ecosystem, consume so much of the Nintendo platform software market, a lot of developers really don't want to put their games up against that. MORE will do so with Switch than with WiiU, especially Japanese devs. It won't be the same situation, it already isn't. But those PS4/XBox games still suffer that situation where Nintendo isn't their market. Which is somewhat fair. They make games for a particular type of gamer who tends to gravitate toward PS4/XBox and away from Nintendo (or if they like Nintendo tends to own both tyes of systems.) It's fair that there's different systems to suit different gaming tastes....so long as there's enough software for all of them. WiiU....didn't.

For my part, I own all the systems (except XBox 1....it pretty much just repeats PS4 with less games, but different online.) but my Nintendo systems including WiiU still got the most playtime, by far. And if you're new to WiiU, there's still a great library of games. Some of which are being ported to Switch, some of which are not. It's not as many games as other platforms, but more than enough to make buying the hardware an appropriate value. Now that Switch is out those games should be cheaper, too, so you can save some money as you buy up a good portion of the WiiU library (and no matter the expense of the console, a big library of games always costs way more than the hardware itself!)

It's just all a really unfortunate setup with WiiU. It had the curse of being the wrong product at the wrong time, just before the other companies changed directions in hardware, with the wrong marketing messages, with an unfortunate name that associated it with a different product for a different audience. It definitely stinks for customers....

@Octane The trouble is the "third parties" don't really make console games at all. They're PC developers. They always were PC developers. Microsoft brought them into the console fold with the original XBox, and they drove themselves to near bankruptcy trying to support the console world before successfully lobbying Sony to join the club with Microsoft and just turn their consoles into a PC.

Switch is, of course, largely PC compatible as well thanks to Tegra, but it's still a little more of a challenge due to the reduced peak specs, and their games are designed, really for PC, to the point that often they don't really run all that well on a PS4 either, so dropping FURTHER is something they're not interested in. to a degree it's like Kojima syndrome. Letting the technologists run the development priorities, at the behest of the sales and marketing goals. WiiU on the other hand wasn't even a contender, stuck on the architecture model of the 7th gen consoles the third parties successfully lobbied Sony/MS to DROP. @Norkitesf