They don't need to.

All they need to do is find a developer who needs a publisher to fund their project or a developer who has not much work on and is looking to make some money.

The question here is would they be willing to fund say 50-100million on a AAA mature game? Even though it most likely will not get that money back in sales.

It is happening. Nintendo are publishing games themselves now. Iwata gave the example of two platinum games but they likely have more and plan to make a habit of this. If you actually kept up with wii u rumors they have been approaching independent developers.

If they paid anybody it would have been rockstar. You don't have to pay the biggest milker in the industry to milk their biggest cash cow on a system. Call of duty gets on everything automatically. If anything sony is the one that paid for their failed call of duty vita venture.

It's a shame about the sales of games like BO2 and AC3, especially since they have the WiiU's coolest feature (IMO): playing the entire game on the Gamepad.

Since the previous list was outdated:

Top 15:
NSMBU (243k)
ZombiU (~50k)
Scribblenauts Unlimited
Black Ops 2 (~21k)
Just Dance 4
NintendoLand (bundled with Deluxe)
Epic Mickey 2
Arkham City
Sonic Racing Transformed
Skylanders Giants (< 10k)
Assassin's Creed 3 (< 10k)
Sing Party (< 10k)
Madden 13 (< 10K)
ESPN Sports Connection (< 10K)
NG3: Razor's Edge (< 10k)

Attach ratio for:
WiiU - 1.2
Wii - 2.0
PS3 - 1.1
360 - 3.7

Which means: 510k software + 319k NintendoLand bundles = 829k software sold in the US.

Sources:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-07-wii-u-sells-1-2-games-per-console?
creamsugar

So the attach rate so far is actually what it should be... making a lot of this thread kinda silly.  Go figure.

It does its job, which is to start creating an audience for these games on WiiU. If developers want three solid pillars to support their multiplatform releases next gen, they better start building a foundation for their ruined-abandoned platform.

COD3 on Wii sold 250k around launch time (Nov. 19th - Jan 1st). It went on to sell 2 million.

Keep your finger on the trigger, but don't pull yet......

This is a crazy theory, but I think that back in 2006 people were interesting in the idea of playing a FPS with motion control. Seems kinda silly to me, unless the game is called Metroid Prime or something.

You're both absolutely correct. This isn't difficult to see. I had the money to get the Deluxe system and two games on launch day. It's a Nintendo console, so I HAD to get NSMBU, then had the choice of which 3rd party game to get. I was choosing between ZombiU, Mass Effect 3, AC3 and BLOPS2, happened to choose BLOPS2. People need to understand that the 3rd party attach rate takes a back seat to NSMBU and is further divided among several good games, so that will bring down the attach rate numbers for the individual games. Since there's literally no userbase at launch (duh), you're not going to see huge sales like on other consoles. ZombiU obviously took the cake among 3rd parties because it's not a port, and I hear it's very good. I have no doubt that without ZombiU, BLOPS2 would have had a SIGNIFICANTLY higher attach rate. On top of all that, a lot of buyers probably only have the cash for one game at launch! BLOPS2 will have good legs, no doubt about it.

I'm amazed how quickly people make judgements around here, yeesh!

I like idea of 3rd parties tanking
faq them all, just gimme Nintendo already