Well this is the exact quote: "What we see is that Nintendo customers don’t buy Assassin’s Creed. Last year, we sold in very small numbers. What we see is that they are very interested in Just Dance, very interested by other kinds of games. So what we are trying to do is to focus more on the types of games they are interested in."
Keywords are Assassin's Creed and small numbers, so maybe "none" is not equal to 700k, but at least 200k is equal to "small numbers" at least for a franchise like AC.

I suspect there's a lot more to AC's Wii U sales than just its M-rating though; plenty of E-rated games have sold similar levels on the system.

Is not just the rating, but that one does not help either, the problem is that AC is a very big franchise that usually sales a few million copies and both games that were port to the system did not reach 300k sales nor during launch nor after 1 year when the user base was higher, and got sales well bellow the PS4 and X1 where there was NO user base at all.

All I'm saying is, AC3 on Wii U outsold Just Dance 4, and Black Flag outsold Skylanders Giants, so it's not like the M-rating is the overriding factor.

Early adopters are not usually the kind of players that buy Just Dance and Skylanders, the next year Skylanders did sold more than AC 3 and AC 4, and the same happened with Just Dance, but in the case of almost all Mature (or at least more adult oriented) games, the numbers instead of increased they went down.

None of Ubisoft's E-rated games on Wii U came close to M-rated ZombiU in sales though, not even critical darling Rayman Legends.

......................

ZombiU is a rare case, the game was exclusive, with good gamepad integration (and Hype), also it was a launch title and it was bundled in Europe from the start and also in America a few months later. Usually launch games sale better even if the quality is not that high (looking at you Red Steel), and exclusivity also helps a lot, but that is not going to happen to AC, or Splinter Cell, or many other third party games.

If you want a similar comparison, just check Bayonetta 2, it is not a perfect comparison because this one is published by Nintendo, it includes a second game for free and the user base is higher, it has many things running on its favor that is why if that game does not reaches very high numbers, no third party will care. If we want third party ports, Watch_dogs needs decent numbers, not great because they know that the delay affect it, but at least decent to raise a few brows our way.

There's always reasons why a game does poorly or badly. It's just not as simple as "M-rated doesn't sell and E-rated does" in my view.

As for Watch Dogs, I actually agree with you, but I fear the damage has been done and it has no hope of selling over 200k.

I don't know, people are interest on the game, at least in my country for 2 reasons, there are very few multiple console owners (average monthly income is 650 U$, so a secondary console is a very rare luxury), there is nothing else like it for the console, we can call it the poor's man GTA. I think we are ordering 20 copies of the game, not a huge number but it is something... maybe it can reach 200k, like Black Flag did.