It makes sense to me. Ubisoft had made a claim early on in the Wii U's life about supporting the system.  A well known company (especially one that does happen to make games that do well on the Wii U) will need to find a reasonable excuse (according to an average customer, let's say) to stop making certain types of games on the system in order to not receive backlash and possibly harm their sales on bigger titles.

I wouldn't say that Watch_Dogs for Wii U was solely made for this purpose, but that the way they've been handling their releases on the Wii U seem to point to this.  Given the kinds of opinions people have of the Wii U, their lack of a good effort on the Wii U version of multiplatform titles could be just written off as something to do with hardware.  The whole delay thing can have multiple explanations, but one could also be to further make sure sales do not meet expectations.  Why do that?  It is kind of a stretch, but it's possible that given the current trend, they expected further losses over this. 

Of course, none of this is guaranteed to be the case.  It's just a possibility.  Also, not every company makes the best decisions so arguing they could have done X or Y doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't happen.

I'm an owner of two wii u's myself, one at launch and one which came my way very cheap. I bought them because I love Nintendo games and also for any other exclusives that it might get. Like you I appreciatte Ubisoft's effort with the wii u. They have wasted a huge amount of money in retrospect supporting the wii u where as other publishers abandoned much earlier or didn't even start.

I've constantly read the nintendo fanboy postings where they criticise these wii u games and their timing. The truth has always been and I've been saying it from day one the wii u isn't very powerful but IS very easy to develop for. It only has 3 weak cpu cores and a low end gpu of modern design that are all much easier to develop for than their competitors.  The memory bandwidth of wii u is less than ps3 and 360 so its not exactly hard to work out that less data can be processed.

At this point in time it still staggers me that we are seeing 'weak port' or other lame excuses for wii u. It's not a weak port its a weak console FFS.

I like mature games but I'd be out of my mind spending serious money on a version of the  game that will be the most limited when I already have ps3, 360 and PC.

It's no surprise that wii u ports of games that need less cpu resources can perform well but those that need reasonable cpu resources perform badly.

The reason wii u mature games sell badly is because the console is technically weak and the games perform badly. It's not hard to work out. The wii u is on the same fabrication process as ps3 and 360 yet uses far less power.  Also the wii u gamepad is a poor controller for many games with missing analogue triggers for a start. It's not a competitive design. Nintendo hoped they could sell a technically weak console to a wide audience giving huge profits to them but the reality is this time around people have got wise and its only really a platform for wii u exclusive games which limits the number of consoles that can be sold. Many people will just want a single console.

Instead of criticising Ubisoft or EA the company to blame is Nintendo. They released a console in 2012 only of comparable performance to the ps3 and 360, if anything slightly weaker. Nintendo had a huge area between the performance of 360/ps3 and ps4/one but instead of that pitched it below 360/ps3 with much weaker cpu performance and a gpu at best marginally ahead. That is the problem, it means the only games worth buying for it are exclusive games that you simply can't get on other platforms so it doesn't matter about the wii u's performance level. 

Near enough 100% of the problem is Nintendo. It's not game publishers or gamers its their attempt to sell very weak hardware at grossly inflated prices.  Nintendo deserved this failure and hopefully their next console will be technically competitive.  

I don't think Ubi did all of that just to prove a point, but it's just way too much of a disaster to have been an accident.

1) 6 months late for no reason. No extra content or meaningful optimization for the Wii U or the Gamepad.
2) No marketing whatsoever. Not event tweets. Retailers didn't even know it was coming out.
3) Launch alongside Smash. Perfect way to make sure nobody cares about your game, even if they did know about it.
4) Up to 3x more expensive than other, better versions. The PS4 version was $20 for Black Friday.
5) Very likely no post-launch support, and even missing some DLC that the other versions have.

I mean, you can partly blame it on Nintendo fans not really buying 3rd party/M games, because statistics say that no, they really don't. Unless they're exclusive. Unless they're well marketed. See: ZombiU and Bayonetta 2. Other games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, yeah, people into those games are just going to buy them on another console with better specs. It's not that Nintendo fans don't care about those games. It's that Nintendo fans that do care about those games also have another console. And when your 3rd party game is 6 months late, poorly optimized, and overpriced, yeah, consumers aren't going to care at all.

But being a multi-billion dollar company, Ubi knows all of that already. Just makes it all the more baffling why they did this. It was intentionally sent out to die, but why? Contractual obligations, maybe?

I don't think its hard to work out why mature games fail on wii u;

There are probably 3 main reasons;

1. Many wii u owners will be families or young gamers who won't get/be allowed mature games
2. Many wii u owners love mature games but also have other systems (like me) and will buy them for more capable consoles/hardware
3. Many gamers are only interested in mature games (they wouldn't have bought a wii u in the first place)

So your only chance of selling mature games is really gamers like me in the second zone but they need to be exclusive or at least very special editions that warrant purchase over technically more proficient versions maybe extra levels, great gamepad support etc.

However the userbase is too small and gamers like myself may only make up a small percentage of wii u owners. It may be casual young/family gamers make up 80% of the install base. I don't know the figures but of the 7 million install base may be there is only a maximum 1-2 million gamers interested in wii u mature content.

Evidence suggests otherwise though. EA made an even stronger claim about Ninty and wiiu and completely abandoned development for it because of low sales. Simple as that. Rockstar said they would make a ps3 exclusive, Agent, a game we never heard about ever since they made the announcement. Countless companies have been cancelling games or dropping support over the decades. They never give an excuse and when they do it's either a good one, i.e. low sales, or a lame on (Tomb Raider apparently can only be done on XBONE). There is no reason to believe that Ubisoft is any different and their past actions have shown nothing to suggest that they care about providing an excuse which is not going to convince anyone anyway. They had more than enough examples to justify dropping support anyway. 

The whole conspiracy theory is incredibly silly to me. If you have a theory, at least show (you, the OP, or anyone else) a pattern. Has Ubisoft done the same with psvita recently? Did they do it with psp or wii? What exactly are you basing something that makes zero business sense on?

I'm hoping Ubisoft drops support for the WiiU. Make Nintendo get off its ass even harder.

The bigger question is: Why are AC3 and AC4 even M-rated?
They aren't that violent at all.

I don't buy any of Ubisoft's excuses. Yes, I was fond of them and appreciative for 'supporting' the Wii U when others did not, but even as far back as Rayman goes, that's when they sealed their fate on Wii U. Do you have any idea how much Rayman would have sold in February with no competition and hyped marketing? It had momentum right up until they delayed it. Historically, Rayman sold the best on the Wii, and did far less on the 360 and PS3, so why delay the game just to release it on those platforms? Oh, and did I mention it came out the same week as GTA?

Also, whatever you may think about the Watch Dogs delay, is it not at all curious that they would choose to release the game on the same day that Far Cry 4, GTA V Remaster, and Super Smash Bros. all release? Not to mention the tail end of the first week of Pokemon sales? Come on. This is a big corporation. They sent Watch Dogs out there to die. For me, as a marketing major, the writing was already on the wall when they delayed Rayman. There was no reason to do so from a business perspective, because literally everything you would look at from that perspective was in their favor had they released on time for Wii U exclusively. Instead, they lost their prime release date with no competition, wasted marketing dollars up to that point, and Nintendo lost out on console sales. That was HUGE. Wii U sales wouldn't have been quite so bad, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Rayman alone would have boosted momentum through the roof.

I find this post very amusing for whatever reason..

No, do you? It's all speculation and nothing more. We have seen countless quality games releasing with no competition and doing terribly. No competition does not necessarily translate to good sales. We have also seen many titles do well despite the competition with games like Shadow of Mordor (LOTR game weren't selling that well the last decade so it's not like it's selling well because it's an established IP), and Dragon Age 3. In other words, nothing is set in stone.

Also, yes there was reason from a business perspective. Ubisoft realized that Wiiu was not going to sell as well as people expected it to (based on pre-orders, wii being extremely successful etc) and decided to release Rayman Legends on several platforms at the same time. Why? Because the ps3/xb360/psvita sales would have suffered otherwise. The wiiu install base was tiny and wasn't going to change dramatically with Legends considering that Origins didn't sell that well to begin with. How many people would actually buy a wiiu for Legends and how many didn't already buy one for it before the release was pushed back?