The thing is that yes, AAA can be a metroidvania style game to, and in that case 100k can actually be enough to break even, and 10k for a port is also enough.

But you have to understand that most of us in this thread, when we say AAA we mean the higher cost HD platform games: Bioshock, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, Watchdogs, Call of Duty. We are mostly reffering to AAA in budget and not neceserally in quality. Games in wich huge ammounts are invested, because they have the potential to become multi million sellers.

To put it in a simple movie analogy: we are not talking about Dr. Strangelove (Castlevania) we are talking about Avatar (CoD).

What I'm trying to say is that for a game like Crysis 3, anything under 1 million is a massive bomb.

They are demanding games (technically) and even ports need to potentially sell probably over 300k just to justify the process, and at this point the WiiU is not a certain enough platform (yet), for a publisher to gamble with it.

I am also certain that in time, if sales pick up, and some franchises start pulling decent numbers on the console, EA will forget all their quarrels with the big N, and all of their games will show up on the U.

Caution is advised.

That quote means nothing at all. We could speculate what exactly it means but we will probably never know for certain.

IMO what we can say for sure is that things like these never have just one side, and decisions are made by more factors: Nintendos deteriorating relationship with EA (Origin issues or not), bad financial performance of previosu WiiU titles, not enough dev/advertising muscle left for a 4th editiion etc.

People are jumping at EAs trotha for not supporting the WiiU, but it looks like Origin could have been a better idea for online integration. It is better to get ports, than no games at all.

LOL, your sarcasm-meter is broken.

I'm tired of people claiming the "Nintendo-dronez never buy teh third-partiez", while this claim is obviously untrue. The 3rd-parties only need to adapt to the audience.

NFS probably will be a great game, that's why I plan to buy it. Same with batman, I own it. I don't care for AC though. I was probably a bit harsh here. Point is, many 3rd-party games are really subpar, they often think they come away with horrible bad games. but even for the good ones: nobody forces a Nintendo-fan to buy the games, if he hasn't an interest in them. and for all three games is one thing true: they were all out for PS3 and X360 earlier than for WiiU. That also influences sales naturally. Do we have at this point even one multiplat that was released the same time on WiiU as on other consoles and was not gimped? I can't come up with a name.

To the cost-factor: porting mostly involves programming and (to a bigger degree) testing for specific bugs. The models, the textures, music, leveldesign, overall game direction, general game testing and so on is already done. And that by far exceeds the manpower of programming the game in the first place. Porting involves even less programming, especially if some toolkit/engine is used, as it is standard these days. Early WiiU-games might possibly need more tweaking on the engine, that is true - but that is also a work that can be reused for later releases.

And looking at general gaming-sales: Every budget that needs more than 1 million units to break even is stupid and the risk of losses is extremely high. Most AAA-games should break even on some 100K units. Porting-costs are usually much more smaller (i pointed out the reasons in the previous paragraph). Some 10K sounds reasonable for a port of a AAA-game with some effort put into making it a good port.

neither of them are butt hurt, the only people that suffer from this are wii U owners

funny thing is thats exactly what third parties did for the Wii but people complained that they were not get "any" third party support. ANd people did buy those 3rd party games it just wasnt the games some wanted.