Topic: What the deals with these indie's love for Wii U?

The Wii U, having the least amount of power among the three next-gen consoles, takes the least amount of resources, and therefore less money, to make. Independent devs usually don't have large budgets, so it's a good fit.

But that's not true at all. More power doesn't mean higher cost. Hell if anything costs should be the same if a person is using Unity and only go up since you would have to port to Wii U.

exactly more power means less need for optimisation, that is, for smaller projects. what ends being cheaper and faster

The Unity engine is already optimized for Wii U. Nintendo made a deal with Unity to make that happen, as well as making Unity available for any licensed developer.

EDIT: Porting and optimization aren't even required, so none of what you guys just said, applies.
Technically, they would still have to optimize software, but that doesn't really have to do with any specific hardware. For example, Skyrim can run on PS3 and Xbox 360, but they still did a poor job at actually creating the software.

@SCAR392

I was talking posting and optimization in terms of not using Unity and taking the PC SKU to consoles. There's obviously a little extra work in going from X86 to the Wii Us (power PC?) Compared to X86 toX86.

There's not actually. That's the entire point of Unity. If indies build a game using Unity, it can be applied to any console. There isn't any porting or optimization, because the Unity devkit is already built to accommodate all platforms.

EDIT: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/19/nintendo-forms-wii-u-p...

Hmm didn't know that about Unity.

I wonder many indie devs will stay on the Wii U train as the Xbone and PS4 gain market share.

That's why Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all partnered with Unity, because they can provide devkits that work with any platform that developers have a license for.

The only difference is that Nintendo made this happen almost a year prior to Microsoft and Sony, so indies assumably jumped on board sooner. That would explain why indie games are more abundant on Wii U, for the time being, but it doesn't and probably won't necessarily have be that way for very much longer. Indies get to choose which system they have their game on. If indies make enough money, all 8th gen consoles could share that library of games.

EDIT: Indies could go anywhere from being on Wii U, to Xbox One or PS4, vice versa, or just put their game on everything. Unity is somewhat of a big deal, because that's where the least constraints are for the industry, as a whole.

It depends on how well they do on Wii U. As far as I'm aware, the games people actually cared about (and at least one no one did I think...) have done pretty well on Wii U.