Zelda U to become Zelda NX?

Great I get wrapped up in a political discussion for a couple nights and come back to the news I had been dreading... Zelda U delayed ... I knew this was going to happen. grr I was so looking forward to this title this Christmas so be it I guess. Better a polished, complete, delayed game than something rushed.

If mario games aren't selling *enough* systems of wii u, animal crossing isn't gonna do much more than a couple of weeks boost, even will still be less than xbox one on same weeks

Well this is sad news. . .

I disagree.

Nintendo always has unannounced stuff, usually at least a few that are set for release within about half a year of the time that they finally announce it. The fact that Nintendo delay Zelda in such a relatively off-hand way (notice that they didn't actually apologise, as they normally would when having to announce things like this?) suggests that they have some things up their sleeves.

I'm betting that we'll be getting an April Nintendo Direct that reveals a big title for release by the end of the year (plus a couple of small ones). They'll have released this information now in order to make sure the ND has clear air rather than having to reveal the Zelda delay in amongst it all, and thus somewhat souring the ND's announcements.

I'm also betting that they fill the gap with something more, remake-wise. Recall that Wind Waker HD came about due to Nintendo's experimentation with engines and styles towards Zelda U? Perhaps something more came of that - they wouldn't want to release another Zelda remake too close to Zelda U, or to Hyrule Warriors, but with the Zelda U delay, 2015 would be the perfect time to release another Zelda HD remake. But then, it might not be Zelda - it could be a Mario remake, for instance.

Note that the expectation of more games to announce isn't based solely on this news - Iwata said as much last month.

Another possibility is that they've already lined up the support of one or two third parties with exclusives for release in 2015. There's been a lot of speculation about the next Dragon Quest being on Wii U, on the basis of this, which comes just a week after this. There's also this, which is likely to be announced soon. There have also been other rumblings recently that suggest that there's more coming. Talk has started up again about the fact that a prototype of GTA V was up and running on Wii U a couple of years ago. Crytek has also been in the news in connection with a "huge new licensing deal" that they'll announce "soon" ("new licensing deal" doesn't sound like a normal relationship with existing partners).

And then there's things like Pokken, which has been in a "it will eventually come to Wii U" state since initial announcement... given that it's almost certainly being developed semi-simultaneously for both Wii U and arcade, it's likely that they'll be able to announce the Wii U version for this year if they need to fill a gap. In fact, its "TBA" status is probably because they wanted freedom to use it to fill a gap.

In short, the conclusion that it'll be a "grim year" for Wii U is unfounded, based mostly on a lack of experience with Nintendo's MO (this sort of thing happens when a person is used to the way Sony and MS operate - Nintendo does things differently, even on the announcements front).

Nintendo views the Wii U as a GameCube like dud, even worse. They know that.

So they're Twilight Princessing the next Zelda for NX launch where it will receive probably a 2x-3x sales boost.

C'mon. Nintendo remembers very well and TP moving to Wii while getting a token post-release on GCN was financially the 100% correct move.

I said this before too -- I don't think Nintendo was ever going to just let what is probably the most expensive game they've made in their history rot on their smallest console userbase.

Pretty much this.  I don't think they really care about the Wii U sales at this point as much as boosting the NX's launch.

It's going to be bad for Wii U sales, but there's still some fun games for owners to play so that's OK.

I'm not so sure about that... Nintendo really needs to release big games like Zelda to push more console sales. Sales for software may slightly increase but hardware won't. Hardware sales = increased software so they really need to release this game as soon as possible.

WiiU during the Holiday 2015 is StarFox that is your big seller. No StarFox on the Wii makes this an easy one to get some selling