Hiku said:
Companies don't have to be certain before making decisions though. If they suspect it's not going to go well, they can chose to wait and observe. The first game I mentioned, Metal Gear Solid V, was announced and showcased as far back as in August 2012. Yet not at one single point in time since then was a WiiU port ever mentioned. This too was before any "clear" sign of WiiU's future sales appeared, as it was before WiiU even came out. And this is no doubt because Konami never thought the port would be worth making for the WiiU.
"Third parties wanted Nintendo to pay for ports"
And that is only a testament to the developers low expectations of the sales their games would generate on the system. Which is no ones fault but Nintendo's. It's their responsibility to make the console appealing to a wide enough crowd to make third party devs not feel afraid to invest in it. And Nintendo didn't do that. Because even before the console launched, there was a very big concern for the future. Specifically, that when the era of cross gen games started to come to an end, there would be no reason for third parties to make games for the WiiU because of the power and architrectural difference between it and the other 8th gen consoles, unless it's sales were very high.
Nintendo chose to bet on the expensive Gamepad instead, which apparently only garnered to a much smaller audience than they hoped for.
It's not about entitlement. It's simply about being profitable. If they thought the port would be worthwhile, they would make it. It's not like they have anything against making money. They're not asking Sony for money up front, because they know they have a good chance of being profitable on their system.
Because when we get down to the core of why third parties left WiiU, there's really only one single reason. That they don't believe the game will be profitable.
And even if the game happens to generate a bit more revenue than the cost of the port, does that automatically mean that it was worth it? No it doesn't. Because if that profit is only marginable, a company could have spent that time and those resources to work on a much more worthwhile project that could have given them more revenue.
If we look at Call of Duty: Ghosts that you mentioned earlier, according to VGC numbers (let's assume they're accurate) the Wii U version sold 0.25m on the WiiU, and 9.58m on X360. That's around 38 times worse on the WiiU. Now besides the difference in sales compared to the install base difference of the systems, the question is if those 0.25m sales were even worth it for Activision. It appears it wasn't, because they didn't release the next games on the system.
Watch Dogs is another example. According to VGC it only sold 0.07m. That's abysmal if even remotely true.
It's not like these companies have anything against making money. They just weren't doing that on WiiU. Some of them gave it a shot, and failed. Some chose to wait and observe first, because there were obvious bad signs from the beginning.
As for Indie developers, they generally develop more simple games that don't require as much coding or personel, and don't have many other more lucrative projects they could spend those already small resources on. Every game they make that are successful are often good opportunities for them to spread as wide as they can, because you never know if your next game will be popular as well. So porting those simpler and cheaper games make more sense. Unlike popular franchises like Call of Duty for example. Those guys always know that their next game will sell well. At least as things stand today. So they have more lucrative things to use their resources for than WiiU ports that don't don't end up selling as well as they want them to.
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