Topic: Why does the Wii U get so much hate?

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@TheRealThanos First of all, let me say that I quite enjoyed reading your comment, while I think you were degressing at times, it was still an interesting read at all times, bringing several good points to the table.
The first thing you alluded to, about the hate being from gamers or the industry or both, is one such point. We definitely should differniate that, but honestly, in the end, some of those reasonings will still overlap, some circular logic, so to speak, is bound to apply. In the same vain we should pay more attention to what is actually the cause of a development, what is the effect and last but not least what is the occasion. Despite that it is something I'll keep in mind in the future.

Btw, while it might be OT, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why gamers "hate" (I still feel that is a poor term to use on the subject, but anyways) the WiiU.

As for your actual comment, I'll only address the last part, since for the most part, I agree with what you said, and I really only want to add a couple of remarks, where I think your reasoning was flawed.

First, the last point about the "Self-fulfilling prophecy behavior", I didn't really get. Why would any of the big publishers have to "prove" anything? If they feel porting/ releasing on the WiiU is not economically viable, they would just skip on it, wouldn't they? You make it sound, in my understanding, as if they had to somehow create a pretext for that? I'm really not sure they do.
In the same vain, I wasn't entirely sure what you meant by "delivering inferior versions of their own software for full price". If I understood you correctly, you yourself made the point, that, while it is not harder but just "less easy", to develop for the WiiU, this of course does drive up costs? To me, from a business side of things, logic would imply, that either the games will be "proper" ports, optimized to architecture at hand, and thereby more expensive, in one way or the other, or they will be about the same price, but "poor" ports, with little optimization. I mean just look at Ubisoft's more or less offical policy when it comes to PC ports. It's not really clear to me, why a dev would bear any responsibility for soaking up that additional cost?
As far as games for the PS4/X1 go, that take actually advantage of those most similar systems, ports of those games would have to be inferior anyways, since the WiiU is a weaker system, despite you being absolutely right about there being no point in 1:1 comparisons. In the end, you are left with a very real power gap, even if you account for "proper" optimization and the locked system ressources, which exist on all three platforms of course.

This brings me to my last point, about this: "It is NOT about power, the GamePad, region locking, different chip sets and it's DEFINITELY not about Iwata". I mostly agree, but for the first two points. Before I get to those, I'd like to add, that I'm not familiar enough with the company structure of Nintendo to assign blame, but Iwata's position, and everything you wrote about company culture/ tradition, would sugget, that he HAS to bear the brunt of the blame for "Nintendo's marketing failure" ...so in that regard, hate for Iwata would not only make sense, but be somewhat undestandable, I wager. I'm not sure there is any hate for Iwata as far as the industry itself is concerend, I really can't speak to that, as for gamers though, there certainly is some hate and for the aformentioned reason, it is somewhat hard to argue with that, I think.

That aside, in regards to power and the Gamepad, I feel you might be wrong or at least only temporarily right. I think the Gamepad is a burden, in some ways, it is a burden in the same way Kinect was and still is. Ironically, I think no where does this become much clearer than by Nintendo's own efforts. I think, after reading your entire comment, you will probably disagree with me, but still, I have to say, most of Nintendo's developers themselves don't seem to know what to do with it. Case in point are for example Intelligent Systems efforts with Wario Ware, which I found, to put it polite, rather, let's say, lacking and uninspired. Additionally, as much as I admire and adore Miyamoto, seeing his projects on the matter, I can't help but feel that even he has an extremly hard time coming up with anything worthwhile here, that will make a real difference to the consumer, add value for them in one way or the other. It can't be a coincidence that so far, for the really overwhelming part, the Gamepad was just used to off-load HUD elements from the "main"-screen to the "second"-screen. Tragically, I think that was not even always benefical, at least in the case of MK8, one of Nintendo's carthorse titles noless, the placement of the map felt not only forced, but actually like a downside. The fact, that they felt the need to address this via an update, is quite telling I think. But I don't want to get into the Gamepad much more than that, I think I made my point already ^^.

As for power, there is an issue here, I feel you have basically just ignored. The question is this, what about next year, and what about the years after? What I mean is this: Sure you could have put Destiny, with some very real effort I guess, on the WiiU ... but what about Destiny 2 and 3? Assuming those will push the graphics, the physics, the AI, the scale of the world and so on and so forth, I really don't see how the WiiU would be able to cope with that. You seem to be way more tech savy than me, but from what I can gather, that seems like a deadend to me. That is all completely ignoring the very legitimate question of the viability of the Nintendo Network vs PSN/ Xlive. The reason I chose Destiny is of course it's imminent release next week and it's status as one of THE big industry releases this year. But of course the real meat here lies with the 2015 releases and what will come beyond that. Would it be possible to make a game like The Division, to give another example, or even The Witcher 3, for the WiiU, without, due to technical limitations, compromising it's design? Completely ignoring the fact, that porting might not be economically viable once again, how about the actual integritiy of the product itself? If you read, sometimes between the lines^^, some interviews/ comments by industry representatives, the impression I get, is that, even if it made economic sense, to bring those big future games to the WiiU, it wouldn't make any sense design-wise.

In that regard, the WiiU has a problem, a design-flaw if you will (again, who would be held responsible for that?^^) and on that ground I would contend, that your claim, that "if the Wii U's market share was large enough, then most of these games WOULD be coming to Wii U, there's no doubt about that, not even a millisecond", is not entirely correct, or to be more precise, WILL be turning out to be wrong. Certainly, WAY more games would be coming the WiiU's way, IF it could boast the same kind of installbase as the other platforms, but "most" seems doubtful at best, and if we take a long term perspective, that share would certainly decrease over time, probably rapidly at that. I mean, and that is important to keep in mind, even the Wii, with it incredible installbase last gen, didn't get blessed with many of the big "next-gen" games, just think of the likes of RDR or GTAV etc. The WiiU has nowhere near that market power, and the incentive to limit one's design to accomodate the WiiU is basically non-existent.
If I put it that way, I have to say, I think I might actually be glad, that this seems to be in fact the case.

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@Ralek85 I'm going to try to make my post a bit less huge, because both of us seem to have a gift for humongous comments if the topic interests us...
Having said that, I am going to address all points that you made, but I will group some of them together for reading convenience and will also do it in no particular order.

First off, if the time and money was there, most of these games would DEFINITELY be coming to Wii U. I say this because the facts support it. ANY game that is now still coming to Xbox 360/PS3 (and that will be for at least another year) could run on Wii U, PERIOD. That is both a technical fact and a given fact BUT the investment is now far too great in comparison to what companies could get out it, so from a business point of view the Wii U isn't interesting anymore or yet. (I'm not going into "the Wii U is already dead" point that some people like to make. Not you, just to be clear)

In relation to that point and my comment stating that they COULD have made decent ports, when you have truly read it all and understood it, then it should have been clear that I meant that when the Wii U had just been introduced, was getting ready to be launched, games were already in development, also quite a few third party titles. That means as I have also already said, that the money thing wasn't an issue YET because that risk is there for third parties on EVERY new platform they start to make games for.

Nobody can predict the future so no one could have guessed back then that Nintendo would fail so hard in marketing their new console and that the result would be where we are now. The other side is also true: we never know how good a new console will perform as well, so even if a console was massively successful last generation, that is ab-so-lute-ly no guarantee whatsoever that it will be again this generation.

What that means is that the initial risk at launch of a new system is for the larger part EXACTLY the same.

That brings me to the you not getting the "Self-fulfilling prophecy behavior". I thought I gave enough examples to give you an idea of that, but let me try another example:
Let's say we are going to buy a car. You want a certain brand, a certain type and you are going to look for a good price, but you would also expect the car to be fully functional and give you your money's worth, right?
Now what if you chose to buy the car from your regular dealer out of loyalty and because you appreciate his service, but the car is delivered by a third party and you find out that it is missing some extras that may not be entirely necessary but would increase the value and enjoyment that you get from that car, and you have already seen that the very same car can be bought elsewhere, for the SAME price (or less) but WITH all the extras.

Guess what you're going to do? You will not buy that car from your regular dealer. And you will not be the only one, so in the end the car manufacturer will no longer want his cars to be sold by your regular dealer because "apparently" he isn't able to sell them. And they knew full well that they were delivering incomplete cars to begin with so it is actually the fault of the manufacturer.

Moral of the story: don't give us games with less content and options than on other consoles and certainly don't ask full price for it, only to see it fail in sales, which you could known before you even started. THAT is a self fulfilling prophecy.
That also relates to the inferior products remark. You HAVE to invest to make a profit. These developers put one toe in the water and said: "no, I can't swim here, it's way too cold" instead of diving in completely and taking a chance on success.

I was ONLY talking about the period in the beginning, when the first parties wanted to make some easy money by literally dumping their CPU based Xbox360 ports onto the Wii U with little to no optimization. This could also be partly Nintendo's fault for all we know because they wanted a lot of third party games on Wii U that were "hardcore" to once again attract the "serious" gamer, so they might have wanted to rush things a little bit too much.

Developers didn't take their time, didn't fully optimize CPU based software towards the GPGPU based Wii U and low sales were the result. AGAIN: this was BEFORE anyone knew the Wii U was going to bomb so the excuse of low user base and so on wasn't there YET.
From a business standpoint, publishers then had to make decisions. The other two consoles were going to be launched, and they offered an environment that was more or less a PC in a box with quite a lot of off the shelf parts, so the whole process of design, programming, porting and optimizing was very level because you design on a PC, implement middleware on a PC to add mechanics and to port to the console dev kits so the process was streamlined. And time is money so from the publisher's point of view it is very logical.

But the power gap, as you say is NOWHERE near last gen. I can say this time and again, and we can go into the technical details, but I won't for now because it would make this comment so much longer. Suffice it to say that last gen the power scale Wii to Xbox360/PS3 was 1:10 and now that same power scale is 1:4 - 1:5 (at most and only in console specific software)
So we can safely say that the gap has shrunk immensely. Of course it is still there, because 4 times as powerful is still a big difference, but most of it goes into the details and, as I also already explained, the other two consoles need to do a whole lot more with that extra power. The Wii U just has to play games and has only one platform running everything. The Xbox One for example, has three environments running simultaneously: the base Xbox operating system, a Windows kernel that provides access to web-powered applications and experiences and a third environment that connects these two operating systems to enable the instant switching and multitasking.

So, in conclusion, if you have roughly 4 times the power but you have to do 3 times more with it, then the difference in what you have left purely for games isn't all that big. Really, it isn't. Can't make it any simpler than that. The ONLY exception will (as almost always) be the console exclusive titles because they are more often than not developed with a far longer time scale so they can take FULL benefit of the hardware. (hey, there's that optimization thingy again!)
And later on. in the second and third generation of third party games they will have finally caught up and so games from third parties will also start to look better and better. But until then, and as long as games are also released on the previous HD platforms, the Wii U could easily support such games as well, if we forget about the financials for a while. This is PURELY from a hardware point of view.
All previous consoles were power based, the architecture is known by developers, the Wii U is more powerful than the Xbox 360/PS3, however small that difference may be, it is still a fact so if the old twins can run the games, the Wii U can. PERIOD.
And I even dare to say that slightly downgraded versions of the first batch of games that will come AFTER support for Xbox360/PS3 has stopped could also still be possible: downgrade 1080p to 720p, less advanced graphical effects (lighting, Anti-Aliasing and so on), fewer players online, slightly simpler AI and so forth. Differences, especially the graphical ones, that are hardly noticeable for 90% of the populace while they are playing. Same as with for example the Call of Duty games on the Wii. Ask yourself: why was it possible then? Not because the Wii was easy/easier to develop for but because there was money to be made. And now they have a much more powerful platform compared to the Wii, so tech-wise it should be a no-brainer, especially with multi-platfom games also released on Xbox 360/PS3. The later games will definitely be too much, but by then we will be near the end of 2016/beginning 2017 and Nintendo will probably have introduced the successor to the Wii U.

As for Iwata: yeah sure, he is the face of the company so if you have a problem with someone you look them in the face and maybe even hit them in the face too. But besides being the face, Iwata ISN'T the company. He is only managing and representing. There's a board of directors that could kick his butt to the curb if they thought that would be the right thing to do, but apparently it wasn't because he's still here.

It's almost like in sports: if a football team is performing badly we always fire the coach nowadays and to me that is the stupidest thing possible. The coach is NOT ON THE FIELD! He can tell his players a thousand upon a thousand times what they should do, but THEY have to do it. So if they fail, then they haven't executed the coach's plan correctly or the other team had a better plan but that doesn't take away from the expertise and experience that this coach has.

As far as the hate goes: most of these decisions are business related and have nothing to do with emotions. For the most part it's about money.
My bullet points still stand, though because there is a lot of enmity in business. (I've experienced some myself when I went to work for the competition) but the largest reason is everything that is driven by money.

As for the fan hate: misconception, lack of intelligence, need to express yourself/make yourself count, sheep behavior (can't be alone in supporting something/someone if your friends all support something else) and not knowing the other parties and also not being open to try them out, so it's automatically inferior because you "obviously" support the superior platform.

Well, that's it. Unfortunately it became a huge post again... oh well...
If I missed anything I'm sure I'll hear back from you...

@kyuubikid213 I didn't say ALL developers and I also didn't say that they don't KNOW how to optimize. They DO, because they know these sort of environments very well as I've explained in detail in the previous comments, but the way things are standing right now, it just costs too much time and money, so the publisher is never going to allow them to do that because the investment wouldn't be equal to what they can earn from it.