As I recall at E3 2011 (or even 2012?), Nintendo said that they designed the console with 3rd parties in mind, and as such there was nothing but praise for the system. Who knows what happened to cause such a change.

Assuming that Microsoft's console also ends up with 8 GB of RAM, that is what happened to it.   With both of them having that much RAM, third-party codes to that and won't bother with Nintendo's offering.  This change makes a difference.

Imagine how much story you could make with all that RAM. I'm salivating.

War and Peace I am sure doesn't need that amount of space.  Will see what happens when implementing games though and so on.  Still, with this is very much an increase in dev costs.  Will see how it goes.  What it means is Nintendo is not able to partake in what games come out for the other two.

I honestly don't think this is the reason. Because lets look at the facts. At E3 EA and Nintendo were hlding hands. EA had devs kits efore anyone else. EA was bragging how aweomse the WiiU features are and how they have a huge plan with Nintendo.

Even if they found out about the ram. I would simply put it down to sorry tihs was our first dev kits, originally we reserved that ram for testing of OS and other functionality to check stability of the system. In V5 or whatever of the devkits we have now made it available.

THen we here from multiple sources that NIntendo and EA broke up over the Origin fiasco. If your reason was the real reason this would have leaked out though other sources as not everyoen can keep a secret.

Also this is no different than PS4 guys who had about 1.5gb of ram (out of the 4gb) for games to work with and now has been bumped up.

THe only real mistake i think Nintendo made was to release little ram. If they knew their OS would need 1GB I would have beefed that up to say 4gb. So 3gb was available for games.  Similar to how Sony now beefed up to 8gb because they probably realised their OS and the caputre video function would take up significant ram (as encoding on the fly is resource heavy). My guess will be probably 4-6gb of that ram will be available to games.

Because their belief is that they could make more money with Nintendo being gone.

Do you think third parties are happy to make games for six (PC, three home consoles, two handhelds) or more platforms (legacy systems from the previous generation)? Money spent on hardware can be seen as being equal to money that can't be spent on software. Just like money spent on first party software can be seen as money that can't be spent on third party software. The more different pieces of hardware that are out there, the more money it is that won't be spent on software.

Ergo, it is in third parties' best interest, if the number of platforms gets reduced as much as possible. PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets won't go away, because they are multipurpose devices, so it's really only dedicated gaming machines that can be pushed out of the market. The belief is that gamers of dying platforms will move to other platforms, like it happened with the remaining Sega fans after the Dreamcast was discontinued. However, it's also in third parties' best interest to keep at least two console manufacturers alive that are relatively even in marketshare. This way third parties can put pressure on each manufacturer to get favorable deals on things like royalty fees and marketing, because it's in the console manufacturers' best interest to sell more consoles. Out of the current three manufacturers, it definitely makes the most sense to push Nintendo out. They aren't needed; rather they are more of an obstacle. Just like Sega was when they refused to can their own sports games to grant EA a monopoly on the Dreamcast.

That's pretty much how many Western publishers operate and also the reason why they won't really bother with the 3DS and see no problem with letting the PSV die. They are unneeded platforms, especially now that smartphone gaming is the sole future. There's the occassional support for Nintendo systems, because if Nintendo doesn't go away, then third parties might as well make the best out of it by cashing in (profits that are then funneled into the development of games for their prefered platforms).

Seems logical enough.. And 3rd parties would rather see Nintendo go so that they don't have to compete against Nintendo's 1st party line up? But what would happen if they went 3rd party then? They'd be EVERYWHERE!

The Japanese mindset is a bit different, but they have been toxicated with endless accusations that they have been falling behind the times which led them to imitating the West. But if their decisions aren't driven by greed, they keep doing what they've done in the past and that is making exclusive games that take advantage of the platform the game is on. Japanese publishers might not post as high sales numbers for their games as Western publishers, but they still compete in profits. This highlights how flawed the Western game development process is.

I underlined something I think makes a lot of sense! And that's why Just Dance is a much bigger franchise than Gears ^^ imo at least. So, do you think it would make sense for 3rd parties to make multiplats for PS360/720 and make exclusive games for Wii U that takes advantage of the HW?

One characteristic of confirmation bias is that people are unwilling to admit when they are wrong (and this includes people in the highest positions). Instead they will look even harder to justify their stance. If you sell as many games as EA, yet still fail to turn profits as a company, it would be time to reconsider your worldview. There are two ways to view the video game business:

1) First and third party software help each other, thus everyone who makes honest efforts benefits from it as the installed base keeps increasing and overall software sales with it.
2) Everyone is on his own. The crab mentality. Instead of lifting each other up, others will be dragged down to the same level.

I guess this ties in with the point made above; games taking advantage of the HW will perform better and boost 1st and 3rd party games. Or, would you say that I am wrong in that assumption?

Too many publishers look at it in the second way, that's why the industry rejected a console that could grow the medium as a whole and thus increase profits for everyone. Companies are run by people; and people don't always make rational decisions. That's also the reason for Nintendo's own collapse. They abandoned a successful strategy and now they aren't doing well.

It is highly likely that Nintendo had nothing to do with it.  The publisher makes those decisions.  Just because a game is coming out on a Nintendo platform does not mean that Nintendo has control.  Same with Sony or Microsoft.

The publisher made the call, and somehow your source misinterpreted that as "Nintendo".