Hedra42 said:
Unfortunately it did make business sense to delay the Wii U version; in this case it's balancing delivering quality against financial risk, and here's why.
There were (and still are) huge expectations for Watchdogs; it had a high profile among all the hype building up for the console launches, and so they couldn't afford to deliver a half-baked game in November 2013.
We have already seen Ubisoft take a huge risk by delaying all versions for six months, thereby missing the launch of the X1 and PS4, in favour of delivering that quality. The delay had a huge negative impact on them at the time. It wiped 26% off their share price, and they had to adjust their forecast from an operating profit into a loss. It's not realistic to think they could announce another delay across the board and expect their investors to stay happy.
A quick exercise taken Here using VGChartz install base and pre-order figures gave a rough estimate showing that only 4% of Watchdogs' potential audience would be Wii U owners.
Taking into account the install base and the fact that ZombiU and other Wii U releases have not been profitable, if Ubisoft had been faced with the decision of choosing one platform to delay so that they could meet their deadline and avoid risking another hit to share prices and profits, delaying the Wii U version seems to be the better decision businesswise.
Indeed, in February 2014, CEO Yves Guillemot said: “We made the difficult decision to further delay the release of Watch Dogs on Wii U to focus the team’s resources where they could have the broadest possible benefit for both our customers and Ubisoft”
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