This comes up time and time again and I never ever save my post about it for easy copy-pasting.
Ubisoft used the $1.2m figure as a blanket number for porting their launch titles. Their launch titles included Assassin's Creed and Just Dance. Obviously, one of those games is going to cost a lot more than the other to port, so I don't think we can really assume that it's the case for every game they've made on the console.
Regardless, if we do assume $1.2m, then a game needs to sell ~ 50k copies at full price to be profitable. I can show you the breakdown of how I worked that out if you really don't trust me on it (just quote me and I'll dig out the graph), but it'd be easier if we just went with it.
Therefore, I don't think that Splinter Cell profited on WiiU. Your Shape: Fitness Evolved; The Smurfs 2 & Rabbids Land are a long, long way off profitability. Marvel Avengers I also believe wouldn't be profitable at the majority of copies were sold at bargain bin prices.
Assassin's Creed I think probably is profitable on WiiU. Even with a higher threshold due to it being a title that I believe exceeds the $1.2m porting cost quote (rather than being under it like Just Dance) it'll still make it, with both games having sold ~ 100k or so at full price.
Just Dance is the biggest success story on WiiU. I'd imagine it costs peanuts to port and it just keeps selling, so yeah.
Rayman was likely profitable. Though it didn't sell much at full price, it sold well at bargain bin prices.
ZombiU is one I can't really extrapolate for, so all I have to go in is the comment from Ubisoft themselves that the game didn't profit, so there's that.
However, I know this thread isn't really about that, but there's more than just profits though. After all, in the case of Assassin's Creed, it's bringing in meagre profits. Ubisoft will have to decide whether there's a legitimate possibility of the userbase expanding on WiiU to embrace the Assassin's Creed games to bring in more profit. If the sales curve from AC III to AC IV is anything to go by, then it's not looking too good.
If the resources used from porting it could be better allocated elsewhere then I'd imagine Ubisoft would do that. Then again, I don't believe Ubisoft are a malicious publisher and would probably keep on pushing with WiiU just because they can.
