This is exactly the same sort of thinking that was applied to the Wii. And third parties completely squandered that opportunity.

The fact of the matter is, developers and publishers have to make their own market on gaming platforms, the only thing that the hardware maker has to do is create the install base. And the Wii proved that the power of the console isn't what determines success. Those that leveraged the Wii properly saw incredible success, and it had nothing to do with graphics or power, but intelligent and effective use of the hardware in a way that wasn't just a gimmick.

Because I already get the sense of your inclination, I'm going to explain that term - "gimmick". Motion controls are not a gimmick. Touch controls are not a gimmick. Kinect is not a gimmick. A gimmick isn't a piece of hardware, it's how you utilise the hardware. If a game adds motion controls, or touch controls, because those sorts of controls are available, and it can be added to the back of the box, then it's a gimmick. If the game adds these things because it improves the game, because the game is better with it than without it, then it's not a gimmick. There are some times when a gimmick is fine - especially when a console has just released and the tech is being shown off. Nintendo Land is a gimmick. Wii Sports was a gimmick. Being a gimmick isn't necessarily a problem. But if it's not a new and different use of the hardware, then it better improve the experience, otherwise it'll be rejected.

For the record, Wii U sales have been stronger than either the PS3 or 360 saw during their respective launches.

But hey, why bother trying to analyse the situation and think about it, when you can just apply your fanboy bias and ignore every single argument put forward challenging your worldview?

Oh, and by the way, Deep Silver didn't go bust at all, not sure where you got that from. I also don't know why you used it as demonstration of Wii support. The only Wii exclusive they made was Cursed Mountain, a forgettable game released late in the generation. They also made six other multiplatform titles for the Wii (most of which were so-called "casual" titles)... and ten titles for 360, PS3, or both, that weren't for Wii. And their upcoming titles include Emergency 2013, Dead Island: Riptide, Sacred 3, Sacred Citadel, and X Rebirth. So really, I don't know why you bothered to even mention them.

As for Eurocom? They had great results with Goldeneye 007 Wii, which sold almost twice as many copies as the 360 and PS3 versions (Goldeneye 007: Reloaded) combined. And 007 Legends? Despite being on a console with an install base just over 1 million, it's selling nearly as well as the PS3 and 360 versions, already (keeping in mind the difference in release date). The only big flop from Eurocom for the Wii in this respect was Dead Space: Extraction - a spinoff title that was widely criticised for being more concerned with telling a story than being a game, amongst other things. And what was their last game? Harry Potter for Kinect.

And I never said that the Wii guarantees that a company will do well. It still takes, you know, EFFORT.

@ Bolded: I don't see how the decision to not pay for the port of a likely relatively mediocre selling game from a studio whom THQ doesn't own is a bad one. What proportion of the Wii market is interested in a niche shooter like Last Light whom also don't have an Xbox 360 nor PS3? Porting a game like Assassins Creed or Black Ops 2 makes a lot more sense given the fact that Nintendo is likely to incentivise their porting as they are important titles and they are likely to outright sell a reasonable number of copies.

Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!  We have a winner!

Incidentally, this is exactly what most third parties failed to do on the Wii last gen.

Well, I'm working on the assumption that THQ are the ones funding development, based on the fact that THQ speaks in terms of "we" when discussing development of the title. And if THQ are funding development, they can require development for more platforms.

Meanwhile, who said anything about the Wii market?

And Nintendo isn't incentivising "important" titles, they're incentivising titles for which UPad usage is strong and unique.

Tell me, if someone owns both a 360 and a PS3, are they completely incapable of choosing which platform to get games for?

Yep two weeks to port the code over and get it running without textures. From memory I think he called it blue (or some other colour) code or something weird.  Basically the polygons unrendered.

Someone feel free to correct me with the correct terminology for this..

Why would they want to pay for it? Why would they want to push it? They have limited resources.

Why talk about the Wii market? Well you talked about building a fanbase but if people already had access to the title on other consoles then it isn't exactly the same as a new I.P. on a new console because it is a sequel. If you've already rejected a game on the Xbox 360 or PS3 what makes the same game desirable on the Wii U?

So you are saying Cursed Mountain was  a bad game? 

Have you actually taken the time to look at games sales on the Wii? Other then Nintendo and bundled titles, sales are incredibly low even when you don't consider the market share the Wii has. If you do, then you should notice that other then one or two games, the Wii has had the worst game sales this generation.

You really don't understand the wii....The Wii was seen as a gimmick by a lot of gamers, but seen as the "in thing" by a lot of non-gamers. If you want to play a lot of the popular franchises this generation, you couldn't play it on the wii, hence the reason that there is no point in putting those franchises on the Wii U as the people who want to play them will already own either a 360 or PS3. 

The wii u launch may be adequate but nevertheless, it's no way near reaching the market that is the PS3 or 360.  

You are the one who isn't rationally thinking about this but rather just raging at devs "not thinking". And I'm not a "fanboy" - i'm a PC gamer so I'm actually the unbiased one here. But y'know, blame everyone before looking in the mirror. 

So let me repeat myself:
If you are developing a game that will go on the 360 and PS3, which are significantly larger markets then the Wii U, whilst being sure that most Wii U owners will own either a PS3 or 360, why develop for the Wii U? More to the point, why develop for the Wii U this close to the end of a gaming generation when you could be focusing on the next gen? 

Also look at it this way. Are you saying that almost every big publisher and devloper out there all have it wrong and that you, someone who doesn't work in the industry, has got it magically right? Did you make the tinfoil hat yourself or buy it from a Doomsday prepper?

FYI: http://www.edge-online.com/news/deep-silver-vienna-closed/

I know what you mean - after all, Final Fantasy VII was a flop when Square Enix put it on a different platform from the one that its predecessors came from.

Meanwhile, as far as many gamers would be concerned, Metro: Last Light would be a new IP. This doesn't just include those who owned Wii, since the first game sold well under a million copies.

I also notice you completely ignored my question at the end. It wasn't rhetorical... at least, not in the sense that I didn't want an answer. I'm making a point, that people that own multiple consoles choose which console to play a game on based on something other than which platforms the game is available on. You falsely assume that, since they own a 360 and/or a PS3, they would have no interest in buying the game for the Wii U, or that they wouldn't be any more likely to buy it for the Wii U than for the 360 or PS3. In other words, you falsely assume that they wouldn't sell any more copies of the game if a Wii U version were released than they will with only 360 and PS3.

But even if it were true, the Wii U is a new console with new features, and establishing a market on the system now is a good idea.

Oh, and "limited resources"? Give me a break. They originally announced that the Wii U would get the game, a year and a half ago. If there were resources sufficient to cover a Wii U version then, there's no reason to assume that such resources just magically disappeared.

Im confused, i thought it was common knowledge that THQ simply doesnt have the money and it had nothing to do with Wii U's power?

I didn't say Cursed Mountain was a bad game, I said it was a forgettable game. Meaning, it didn't really make much of a splash, in the end. There was little by way of PR or advertising, it didn't have any sort of developer or brand recognition, and its review scores averaged below 70% on GameRankings. There was nothing solid to generate buzz or sales from, so it doesn't surprise me that it didn't sell all that well.

And regarding the "closure", need I point out that it closed within only a few months of Cursed Mountain's release. Not to mention that, as I said above, Cursed Mountain lacked any sort of effort to sell the game (not saying the game was bad, although it didn't have strong reviews). And the two guys that founded Deep Silver Vienna as Games That Matter both left a couple of months before it was closed. Oh, and Deep Silver Vienna is not "Deep Silver", it's a single studio. Single studios get closed all the time. They took three years to make one game, and that game ended up being a weak, new IP that got no real publicity. What did you expect, exactly?

Meanwhile, I do like how you're using all of the "right" words - "non-gamers", "gimmick", etc. I don't know why you think that being a PC gamer means you're not a fanboy. By the way, "fanboy" is a term I use to also refer to what I sometimes call "anti-fanboys". What's an anti-fanboy? A person who has as much of a hatred towards a specific company as a fanboy has love for a specific company.

The fact of the matter is, the Wii U is a console that will sell itself on its merits. If it has interesting, high quality games that you can't get anywhere else, people will buy it. Just as happened with the Wii. Just as happened with the PS3 and the 360. The games sell the system. And a smart third-party company establishes their market on each platform, so that they can maximise the total size of their market. They don't try to segment their market so that each platform gets games of a certain type, because that results in stagnation.

For the record, I really couldn't care less about Metro: Last Light. I wouldn't have bought it, anyway. And based on sales of the first title, I doubt that it'll do all that well, selling on systems that have a glut of games very similar to it, all of which it has to compete against.

One of the big flaws in the thinking of most third parties is the "someone else established a market for X on the system, I should try to sell to the same people". This is red ocean marketing. Looking for where there's already blood in the water, so to speak. The thing is, it's a highly inefficient method, as almost always, the company that hits it big will be the one that people continue to patronise, and the copycats end up with scraps at best. On the other hand, when one puts in a strong effort to bring a high quality title to a platform that doesn't have a game like it, it often overperforms. See Goldeneye 007 Wii.

You suggest that I'm saying that all of the developers have it wrong and that I have it right. Not at all. I think that developers know what I'm talking about, but are just as swayed by what they'd like to do as anybody else. They'd rather work on the most powerful hardware than on the hardware that the player would most prefer. They are fallible.

But when you look at the ones that have made the right choice, you see the dramatic difference. Note that this "right choice" doesn't have to mean "supporting Nintendo's hardware" - it means making choices that go against the industry's current path, it means identifying sections of the market that are underserved, and serving them. It means intentionally avoiding trying to copy the current mega-franchise, and instead breaking out into a completely new direction. Every break-out hit came from nowhere. That's how it works.

In the meantime, let's look at publisher support for the Wii, shall we? Ubisoft supported the Wii strongly out of the gate. They have 15 million-sellers on the system and total sales of over 75 million from 127 games. Square Enix barely gave any support to the system, including one instance where they ported a DS game over to the system, didn't update the graphics, and implied that it was a feature. They had no million-sellers, and less than 4 million sold over more than 14 games - which includes a few games where they were just a distributor in Japan. Capcom was all over the place, sometimes giving strong support, sometimes dropping the ball. They saw their best ever console Monster Hunter sales, beating the original PS2 game by more than 4x, with their best-ever western sales of the franchise. Yet they couldn't release a new Street Fighter title for the system.

When developers make strong titles that don't try to compete, and they back them up, they get results. Resident Evil 4 was the Wii's first strong horror title. It saw strong sales, for a port of a game released in the previous generation on both Gamecube and PS2. They then did something different in Umbrella Chronicles, and saw huge sales there, too. Ignoring the potential for more survival horror like RE4, they made another lightgun RE Chronicles game, which then had to compete with a glut of other lightgun games, including House of the Dead and Dead Space in the horror category. When Konami came in with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the regular survival horror genre had gone untapped, and the result was stronger sales than the PS3/360 Silent Hill title released at a similar time.

No More Heroes was released on the Wii. It didn't sell exceptionally well, but it was one of Suda 51's best-selling games of all time, anyway. It was then ported to the PS3 and 360, with some upgrades (especially to graphics)... and it sold far worse. The sequel on Wii sold better than the originals on PS3 and 360. Why? Because No More Heroes was something different on Wii. It was just like everything else on the PS3 and 360, in that it had to compete against much stronger titles that appealed to similar people.

And like I said, it's not all "better on Wii". Sega Superstar Tennis was released on PS3, 360, and Wii. Despite most of Sega's games selling better on Wii when cross-platform, this game did best on 360. Why? Probably because the Wii had numerous tennis games, including a pack-in, while the only competition it really had on the 360 was Top Spin 3, released around the same time. So why didn't the PS3 get the sales? Probably because it had Virtua Tennis as a launch title in Europe, and thus not long after launch in the US. So Sega was competing with themselves on the PS3, but not on the 360. Note that this issue wouldn't have arisen if it had been released a year later, and thus the PS3 version likely would have sold better, especially factoring in Move.

There are so many other examples. Sonic Unleashed, for instance. Guitar Hero III. The LEGO titles. Epic Mickey. Call of Duty 3 (compared with later CoD titles, after Activision ignored the Wii). Tiger Woods 08-10. The list goes on.

The facts, to put it bluntly, are on my side. Your side consists primarily of "but the Wii U isn't a lot more powerful than the PS3 or 360, so why support it?"... which is probably how a lot of developers think. But consumers don't care about power, they care about gameplay.