They have been meaningless placeholders that stir people up far more often.

That doesn't discount the time they've been right though. I prefer to be prepared for the worst.

Offically confirmed

November 21, 2014 NA

December 5 EU

December 6 JP+ AU

i get being pessimistic but your over pessimistic sometimes :P

Seriously though, I was so crushed by last year's Tropical Freeze delay that I'm pretty sure my pessimism is incurable.

Actually, it does discount the times they've been right. If a method of prediction yields the incorrect answer to a yes-or-no question more than 50% of the time, what good is it?

Better yet, simply use your best judgement. A single placeholder date on GameFly (who has a history of triggering false alarms) is a lot different from a date corroborated by multiple retailers. The least you can do is to be shrewd enough to recognize the distinction. You'd be doing yourself a favor.

Being delayed by a few months is far from the worst thing that can happen to a game. You're extremely lucky if Tropical Freeze's delay is the most upsetting thing to happen in your gaming life in the past year.

Captain Toad was revealed four months ago. In all likelihood, it was made start-to-finish in barely over a single year. And we can all be confident that it will be a high-quality title, considering the pedigree of its developer. I understand being frustrated with Nintendo as a publisher for getting their dates wrong a few times, but I'm sure you realize that these delays that have happened have been for the better, and Captain Toad is the wrong target for your pessimism. Just look at EAD Tokyo's release schedule:

2007 -- Mario Galaxy

2010 -- Mario Galaxy 2

2011 -- Mario 3D Land

2013 -- Mario 3D World

They did not suffer the "HD delay" that Pikmin and W101 and other Nintendo games suffered. They have stayed right on-schedule all along, even while lending a hand on other projects and developing smaller titles on the side. They are unparalleled in their quality and their consistency. I think your time would be better spent counting the hairs on your own head than worrying about the productivity of EAD Tokyo. If their game is delayed by a few months, you will play it a few months later, and you will enjoy it no less. We're at a point I wouldn't even call "pessimism."

I apologize if I sound harsh, I have your best interests in mind. You need not worry about such little things. It is Nintendo's job as a publisher to worry about getting their dates right. Letting a hiccup in that process cause you undue stress will not benefit you.

With no third party support though, delays mean months without games. As a Wii U gamer, that present me with something of a dilemma.

I guess for some people that's a problem. I have a hard time empathizing with that issue because sometimes I go long stretches of time without buying a game (I bought nothing in-between Bravely Default and Smash Bros, for instance), and rarely feel like this is a "dilemma." I buy the games I want to play when they come out, if I find myself itching to play a game in the meantime, I replay a classic. I have dozens of those to choose from and they haven't started to bore me yet.

Also, increased third-party support would do very little for me, because I wouldn't buy most third-party games even if they were available to me. I guess I'm part of the problem, but I don't think it's a problem worth solving if the solution is spending hundreds of dollars on things I don't want.

Millions of people do want to buy those products, just... not on Nintendo systems?

It's more like... on this website, and with the people I know personally, there's not much difference. There are some exceptions, there are some Sony/Xbox gamers with dramatically different priorities than most Nintendo gamers, but generally in a dedicated little community like this it just comes down to your preference.

In the grand scheme of things, what I see is that teenagers and college-aged gamers play games the media hypes up the most. It's similar to the box office, where the latest Transformers movie can have a rating under 20% on Rotten Tomatoes yet gross over a billion dollars globally. Nintendo gamers aren't so different though, they just watch different commercials. I think there are informed gamers on every console who try not to let the hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into game marketing every year impact their purchases.