Bananaking21, you deserve a gold medal, or better, a million gold medals

Finally an intelligent and reasonable topic about the WiiU situation here!
Have people discussed it yet ? Not exactely. So far what we´ve seen here about the WiiU was just fanboy wars and nothing more. Glad to see some sense here.

Well... there´s a lot of things Nintendo must do, first better marketing and advertsiment, second: launch new 1st party games soon - forget about the 3rd parties: we all know that what sells Nintendo systems are Nintendo games and 3rd parties will just have any interest when sales get better - and some improvements on their online services. A price cut would help, and while I can´t imagine that happening soon, they will need to work it out before the holidays. Until there, some promotions like the 3DSxl + Luigi´s Mansion (where you get a free game) would be great.

Still, we need to wait when the new games come out. I can´t think about WiiU situation without remembering both Vita and 3DS (in its first semester) struggles. I do believe that the low sales of these new consoles are not just a matter of the products themselves, but it´s about the shrinking market and tha lack of interest from casual players - yes, they DO represent an important share of this business. We may be walking a path where consoles will be irrelevant and people will play their games just on PCs and tablets. I hope to be wrong.

I don´t feel that it´s so surprising, actually. With the low sales of the console and with those always increasing development costs, it seems natural that developers would avoid making projects for the WiiU at least for a while. See the huge losses Square just posted?  The market is getting riskier, some games are not being lucrative even when they sell millions. Developers must play it safe from now on.

Another thing that seems clear is also that developers still don´t have many ideas of what to do with the Gamepad. For example: why Square decided to launch a refurbished Deus Ex for it? It´s an "old" game that many people already know, it may not find good sales. But on the other side they are not spending too much cash on this port and they´re taking the opportunity to make some experiments with the Gamepad. Maybe they´re just trying to work out how to develop for it, ´cause if WiiU sales get better in a near future they may be able to get some profit developing for it ?

The losses posted by SquareEnix are mainly due to massive financial drains from their MMO projects, FF14 and DQ10. Big MMOs are extremely expensive to build and maintain, and that's a constant development drain that can't be used on other projects. When MMOs fail as hard as these two, it is very bad news financially.

I agree that the Gamepad is an intimidating feature on the Wii U, much like the motion control on Wii. Buyers expect the gamepad to be used for something, and so forcing developers to add a new screen to their game. Sometimes this just isn't a viable option, or they feel they will be judged for a "gimmick" or being too simple. Another thing that doesn't seem to be hitting off with developers is the Miiverse functionality, there's just general disinterest outside Nintendo to do anything with it. To be honest Nintendo's online functionality in general at this point is a disaster compared to the offerings by Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo was clearly not ready to move into online integration. Then there's the bad taste left in third parties after the Wii, so there's a general disdain for Nintendo consoles present in the industry.

A lot of people say the specs are also too low for a next generation console, but I think that's one of the least concerns for the console. Sure there are developers who will want to move on to newer tech, but there is still plenty of market space for older stuff too, as well as smaller more simple games. Just look at what is available on Steam. Nintendo needs to reach out to these other developers and let them know this is a good market to put their games on, and promote this stuff among their fanbase to get them to buy more than just Mario and Zelda. Unfortunately both these things are a long and arduous road.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't that the Miiverse panel? There were two if I recall: the panel were they introduce the new policies yesterday and this one.

Edit: Yeah, I'm not. http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20130327_593473.html

That does make sense,BaldrSkies, thanks. I just used that example of Square because lately they have shown a lot of dissapointment with their games sales, namely: Tomb Raider, Hitman and Sleeping Dogs, even with 3.4, 3.6 and 1.7 million copies (respectively) sold !!!! Not many games sell that much and still they feel that sales didn´t cover all their investiment. How bad that can be, huh ?

As for the GamePad, I just think that developers are facing it the wrong way. They´re not supposed to do anything with it actually. Just give their games off-tv play is enough. Of course, it´d be interesting if they can use it in creative ways, but that´s not really necessary. Sonic All-Stars racing, for example, plays on the WiiU as well as on the other consoles, the Gamepad here just works as a map or off-tv play and that´s enough for people to enjoy it. The same with Tekken and Cod:Bo2.

No, no we do not.  It seems like there are more of these threads every day

At least we can find some polite conversation here. On all those threads we just found fanboy wars.

Nintendo is aiming for indie devs, iOS content, Unity games for PC, all to be on WiiU, as they showed on GDC.

I'm thinking that they gave up on trying to get serious support from the big companies.

Wii U will be 1st party big games + digital. They might get lucky and down the road, some of the indie devs may venture in the retail games business and make some exclusive game for Nintendo, either self published (won't be an AAA game) or published by Nintendo.

Don't they usually date upcoming releases at the start of each quarter (or somewere in the early part of the quarter)? The next quarter is four days away.

If they already ditched the WiiU and its instalbase of 4 million. It would no doubt piss alot of people off, including myself. I think that would actually hurt them more than help. I dont think that a new machine is neccissary, it only needs games and advertisement.