If I had to guess, Nintendo was at one point expecting the first half of 2014 to look more like this:
- January - Wii FIt U, 4th Wii Sports Club game
- February - DKC: Tropical Freeze, LEGO Movie
- March - 5th Wii Sports Club game, LEGO Hobbit
- April - Bayonetta 2, Amazing Spider-Man 2
- May - Mario Kart 8, Watch Dogs
- June - Yarn Yoshi
So Several things seem to have gone wrong
Wii Sports Club and Wii Fit U were probably deemed likely sucesses, considering their relatively low budget and being sucessors to huge series. Therefore, their non-impact was probably surprising to Nintendo. A worse-than-expected performance for the first Wii Sports Club titles might have led to the team scrapping development of future titles to instead work on the next Animal Crossing to get it out in 2014. Which is not a bad idea in the long run, since Animal Crossing U is almost certainlya better investment than Wii Sports Club Baseball and Boxing, but it hurts in the short term.
Bayonetta 2 was announced as early as September 2012. For comparison, the original game was announced in May 2008, and was ready for release in October 2009. So if assumptions had to be made, Bayonetta 2 being completed a year and a half after announcement, aka March/April, was probably a safe bet. The game's actually being a Summer release in Japan suggests that the team just needed a few extra months.
Watch Dogs is the whole Rayman Legends fiasco again. Nintendo expected Ubisoft to deliver, only to have them delay the Wii U product in the name of every other platform. Considering how the devs of Rayman didn't know about the 7 month delay until two weeks in advance, it's probably safe to say Nintendo didn't see the Watch Dogs delay for just their system coming. ESPECIALLY since it was going to be a 2013 game not very long ago.
Yarn Yoshi is potentially the most interesting story of the bunch. Nobody ever expected this to sell as much as DKC: TF or Mario Kart 8, but we heard about Yarn Yoshi as early as a year ago, and Good-Feel hasn't released a big game since Kirby's Epic Yarn in 2010. My guess: after Nintendo's bad 2013 financial circumstances, they were told something along the lines of "The investors want Freemium, so make something that's Freemium and not garbage!" And that's how Rusty's Baseball came into being. Problem is, even a minor eShop project could slow down Yarn Yoshi by months, especially if Rusty's Baseball required Good-Feel to make the game from scratch.
So, how did Nintendo react to all this? eShop stuff. NES Remix 2 was added to the lineup and GBA games were rushed to the Wii U.
