Cheesing It Up said:
It's possibly a good thing for the game, but the Wii U desperately needs a killer game this Christmas to stop the console dying.
I'm not sure there's really anything to be done regarding the Wii U at this point. Third parties will either hop on board or they won't; they claim low sales yet still push their games for Xbox One, which is hovering around the same number and performs about the same week-to-week as the Wii U. Sure, devs can point out how the Wii U came out a year sooner, but with the latter being barely a year old, all that means is they were extremely quick to give up on Wii U yet extremely willing to keep trying for Xbox One.
The simple fact is that the vast majority of developers who gave up on the Wii U did so as soon as it launched. Extra effort to develop for combined with the fact that it didn't fly off the shelves like the Wii did meant it just wasn't worth their time when that effort could be put into porting their games to PS3 and 360, which were sitting on 80 million units each.
Nintendo has a long history of unnecessary censorship, being overbearing/controlling, putting out weaker hardware, and being slow to catch on to important trends (like unified accounts, for example). They're changing, but slowly. The Wii U was dead on arrival when it had last-gen hardware and no other meaningful changes to the industry. It was just more convenient to abandon it. It's only gotten easier; EA abandoned the Wii U when Nintendo decided not to go with Origin support, and now there's Unreal Engine 4, which a good chunk of future games will be made with, and it doesn't have Wii U support at all.
That said, the other simple fact is that Nintendo can afford to not care. Besides the fact that most industry analysts predict the Wii U still ending up better than the GameCube and Xbox, the company has a long history of staying in business because they're in such a unique position. They have a dedicated enough core to keep them going; no game publisher has published as many games as Nintendo, no game developer has developed as many games as Nintendo, nobody in the industry has as much current IP. Even when their console does terrible, it's passable.
I think very few people, developers or consumers, are still on the fence about the Wii U. Either they've decided they don't want one and probably won't change their mind (but still could), or they're waiting for a particular game to come out, be it Splatoon, Xenoblade, Mario, or Zelda. Those ones are probably going to keep waiting even if that game gets delayed; I saw countless people claim they wouldn't buy Watch_Dogs when it got delayed because they "stopped caring" yet it still sold 4 million copies in its first week. When people want a game, they'll get that game and that system if they actually want it, regardless of when it comes out.
As for the Wii U in 2015, I wouldn't write it off. Nintendo is about to launch a big new IP (Splatoon), they're launching the second entry in another (Xenoblade), Star Fox is likely to still come out, we just got a new Kirby, there's a new Yoshi in the pipeline, Mario Party just launched, we're looking at Devil's Third and a possible localisation of Fatal Frame, most major indie games seem to be headed to the Wii U now, and who knows what surprises we'll get at E3? Should still be getting SMT x Fire Emblem this year, Project Giant Robot, Project Guard, a possible third new IP from Miyamoto, whatever Retro is working on, that mysterious Bandai Namco job posting for a 2015 Smash Bros... March is too soon to call a system "dead" due to one game delay.
What I'd really like to know: Where is Hidemaro Fujibayashi? What is he working on? He hasn't done anything since Skyward Sword, except a few interviews that hinted he was working on Zelda, yet Aonuma appears to be in charge of Zelda U. I wonder if they've moved Fujibayashi back to handheld Zeldas? It's not impossible to get another surprise handheld entry in the series.
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