I'll guess that Bully (I won't comment on Manhunt given all the problems it had before and after launch) didn't perform as good as they thought and decided that Wii wasn't a viable platform for their mature games. And if Wii wasn't, Wii U with its lower sales would be even worse.

I'm not trying to defend them, just explaining what could have happened.

That's also part of the problem. In next gen, either Nintendo manages to sell their console to people that buy multiplat, or they get their existing userbase to buy multiplat. If not, they won't have the means to attract the big market Microsoft and Sony have, and they are going to be stuck with their actual userbase (at least if they don't pull a Move&Touch generation and bring the mobile crowd to their system once again).

That's a completely different problem.

In my opinion, most users of Nintendo consoles already have more than one system with either a second console or a gaming PC, so Nintendo already has the audience that buys multiplats, it's just that they have grown used to buy those games on the other system. And to make those users change their mind and buy those games on PC they need to have a console that offers the same experience (that means graphics, DLCs, etc.) and at the same time.

And that, nowadays, means a console as powerful as PS4 or a little bit more (to make ports both easier and cheaper) which brings us to a problem. If the console is as powerful as a PS4, what will happen with the handheld that will supposedly play the same games at lower settings?

Their "better (Graphics) API" could be based on Vulcan. I don't think they are in just for 3rd party cred.

Yes, it could be.

Maybe (and this is just a wild speculation) it's a sign that they are going to use an x86 processor and, because of their lack of experience with those kind of processors, they need help and Vulkan is the best place to find it (that could also explain why they have become Contributors, to get a better access to everything involved in that API).

But it's only one of the many things that can be.

Great vid. My hopes for FFXV and FFVII remake on NX just got a little brighter

If Vulcan is as harware agnostic as OpenGL, I fail to see the correlation between it and x86. I doubt its CPU utilisation features are exclusive to one cpu architecture given that the point of a group like Khronos would be, in part, to make the API as open and compatible as posible.

Oh, ok.
Still, a very good solution for 3rd parties and possibly smaller Nintendo games (to not develop engines on purpose).

I didn't knew about this Vulkan news, does it mean the NX will likely have a good hardware (at least something like the XB1)?

Nope, but at least they will have better application programming interfaces (API) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially games and play video