Does the Wii U playing Watch Dogs say anything about how it would compete against other next gen consoles?

[Resident_Hazard]

The next generation will see the same trend as the launch of the current--a lot of cross-platform, cross-generational titles (probably far more this time around) in order to appeal to the audiences of the new consoles as well as to make money on the vastly larger fanbases of the older consoles. The Wii U should easily get any game that fits into this unless there is developer apathy/laziness/lack of interest in making money.

This will last for the next two years, easily. We'll see cross-generational releases until late 2014, possibly into 2015 for most major titles. High sellers like Madden and Call of Duty will be on the Wii U, PS3, PS4, X360, and Durango/NextBox, and will likely see higher sales on the current gen and Wii U than on the much more expensive PS4 and Durango which will have much smaller userbases.

In this sense, we won't really see what the next-gen machines are truly capable of doing until around 2015, in much the same way it took nearly 5-6 years for us to really see what the true capabilities of the X360 and PS3, and in some cases, the Wii.

The Wii U is a more efficient design for the roughly equivalent power of the current gen, and it has a full Gigabyte of RAM for gaming as opposed to the 512MB or RAM for the PS3 and X360, which had to handle everything, not just gaming--and has been pointed out, most modern game engines are scaleable, so there's little reason to pass over the console...

Unless, of course, Nintendo fans once again drive off 3rd party support by ignoring quality 3rd party efforts for the worst Nintendo trite. Honestly, Mario Party and Wii Music should never have outsold House of the Dead OverKill, MadWorld, Red Steel 2, or No More Heroes. They certainly shouldn't have outsold Xenoblade Chronicles--and that one actually came (eventually) from Nintendo.

Third party support on the Wii U is dependent ENTIRELY on the buying habits of the Nintendo core--and in the past (N64, GameCube, part of the Wii), that core has treated third parties very poorly.