Nintendo and Third Party... Who is really to blame?

[Mnementh]

pokoko said:
The Wii U was a bit of a lost cause from the start, to be honest. A few publishers gave it a go but I don't think any of them had any confidence in the console, especially not once development switched over to the PS4/XO.

This is what Anthony Burch from Gearbox said: ""It's probably not too controversial to say the Wii U is not where the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be, and that's a lot of development time you're going to split between a bunch of very different platforms if you're trying to release on all of them simultaneously," he said. "That's really where it comes down to, how similar it is to what you're doing on the other [consoles]. And we've got to strip all of this other stuff out to make it work and we've got to completely redo the controls. It's just not going to happen."" http://www.polygon.com/2013/9/3/4689208/time-for-convincing-third-parties-to-support-wii-u-long-past-says

That was from the start of this generation. I think it's pretty much come to pass. A good example is Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which was a good port, except that they ran out of time and had to ship without offline co-op. That means the Wii U port was the last on the list (and rightfully so, to be honest).

From a practical standpoint, a Wii U release is usually going to take the most time/effort/money while offering the least reward. It's going to be the first version to get axed or the first version to be scaled back due to resource constraints. That's logic.

Not supporting the Wii U is not necessarily the same as not supporting Nintendo. That's something we need to keep in mind.

Why devs always say they need different controls? While they can do somethign special with the gamepad, they just can use it as a classical controller. I assume the devkit from Nintendo already contains some function for off-screen-play, so all they have to do for this is making a menu-entry. Something like that is completely fine. They do not need to completely redo the controls, if they don't want to.