Both the topics of third-party development support and the Wii U's technological strength were put to Satoru Iwata by investors recently. He had this to say:

"In addition, we have started working to expand the range of software developers for Wii U, as I announced in the Corporate Management Policy Briefing in January. As I mentioned just before, the development challenges for home console games selling for around $50-$60 have increased significantly. Around the time when I first wrote a program for a home console game 30 years ago, two developers, including me, completed it in only three months. Things have changed dramatically since then, and we therefore need to expand the range of software developers. We made two announcements at GDC held in San Francisco in late March. One is "Nintendo Web Framework," which is the development environment used for "Wii Street U powered by Google" I mentioned earlier and some VOD services available for Wii U. The number of developers who can use versatile web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript is probably more than 100 times larger than that of the current software developers for dedicated gaming machines. We would like them to create software for our console. "Wii Street U powered by Google" was actually developed by a very compact team whose core members had never developed games for dedicated gaming machines. As I have already mentioned, the application has been and will be updated constantly by a small development team, which means that the development environment has enabled us to significantly reduce development challenges. Since our announcement at GDC, we have received inquiries about it from hundreds of new development companies and individuals. We believe there will be something novel and fascinating from their development work, thereby expanding the range of the software available for Wii U.

The other thing we announced was that developers can now use Unity, a cross-platform video game engine, for Wii U development, and we have started offering it to the developers. There are over a million Unity developers, including many in developing countries where the business of dedicated gaming machines is not prosperous. We would like to create opportunities for these developers to have their games available for Wii U. We hope that these actions to expand the range of software developers, in addition to the functions of Nintendo eShop and payments through e-money I mentioned before, will give us new business possibilities.

As you stated, it is a fact that some software development companies assume that Wii U is not powerful enough. On the contrary, some developers say in interviews that Wii U has a different architecture from other consoles and that, when utilized in the right way, it can perform well. At the moment, there is a great deal of contradictory information. Nintendo is required to make more efforts to dispel such a misconception. In fact, some software companies are actively supporting Wii U and others are not. It is important to have supportive companies enjoy successful sales of a game and feel that their decision to develop something for Wii U was correct. We understand that this cannot possibly be achieved overnight and it may sound unconvincing under the current slow sales of Wii U. We would like to work to revitalize the Wii U market and show you favorable results for third-party software from this summer."

 

Iwata seems to have a firm grasp of reality, which might be a surprise to those who see him as the joker of Nintendo Directs.

Source: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/04/nintendo_outlines_developer_support_and_a_goal_to_address_the_misconception_of_wii_us_capabilities

 

 

 

I think their SDK support has been on the right track, however, in a year or so they need to go beyond Unity and potentially also provide a plug-in (or similar) to UE4 as that engine begins to be more utilized. UE3 and others are good for now.

In 2014, it should never be the case that WiiU misses a AAA 3rd party title. EA needs to be reapproached as well. They'll need the potential great FIFA and Madden games the gamepad could provide. Those two alone would be big for the US and EU markets.

Iwata didn't get his job by goofing around. He's serious when he needs to be and I really like him as the helm of Nintendo. He knows what needs to be done. He has lead Nintendo to 2 major successes: the Wii, DS, and now the 3DS. Hopefully the Wii U shapes up soon. The 3DS was doing horribly until there was a price cut and new games.