People know that Nintendo's biggest critics are their own fans, right?

Beyond that many XBox One third party ports sell just fine despite being inferior to the PS4 version. 

A lot of this is just faux phony outrage from a small subset of Nintendo fans who would never actually buy a game like Project: CARS to begin with. 

Much like all the bruhaha over things like the Watch Dogs port to Wii U which most Nintendo fans really had no actual interest in buying no matter how good the port would've turned out. 

The online community is not really representative of the actual Nintendo fanbase either. If it was, things like Xenoblade X and Bayonetta 2 and Fatal Frame would all be decent sized hits at minimum. We forget even the largest online game community (NeoGaf) is like what? 300,000 registered accounts (probably a good 1/4 that are duplicate/non-active accounts and another 1/4 that doesn't even post on the gaming side). This is nothing relative to the overall actual public that buys video games. 

Sorry, but I will not buy in my console half-assed ports of third part games. If developers don't treat Nintendo users with respect, why should be buy them? Have you seen how awful the vast majority of the ports are? I bought NFS:Most Wanted, Bayonetta 1/2 and Lego: City because they are awesome games, but that's it. If I want to play third party games, I will play them on PC, at least, they don't treat PC users like they are fools.

Wrong assumption.

I have a Wii U and for the first 6 months of 2013 I more or less played exclusively on it. It was great at first but that was because I had a decent backlog (of about 10 games). The problem is once I cleared all my games, releases were few and far between. Nintendo wasnt releasing anything and neither were third parties.

At that point, I started to blame third parties because (a) they barely released any games and (b) the games they released were "unoptimised". But then, I realised that even games that are GPU limited, with low CPU usage (e.g Trine 2 and Bit. Trip.Runner) were barely running better than their 7th gen counterparts. Then I noticed that 7th gen ports had crappy framerates, a telltale sign of CPU limitations on PC gaming rigs. It couldnt be the GPU, since it was suppossed to be more powerful. After reading about the CPU the whole thing began to unravel, once the PS4 and X1s specs were announced I knew it was over.

The hardware, while stronger, was not strong enough to make a significant difference to 7th gen ports. See, even on PCs, unoptimised ports can be brute forced but even the best Wii U ports did not have a true generational leap in comparison to last gen systems.You cant expect developers to bend overbackwards to get a game that runs more or less for free on the PS4/X1 and PC to run on the Wii U. You can talk about scalability all day wrong but theres a big difference between 1 GB of shared RAM and 5GB or shared RAM. Theres a big difference between 3 PPC cores and 6 X86 cores.

Im a programmer by profession so I could and will never subscribe to the lazy devs argument, that simply isnt how it works. Throw in poor sales and poor promotion from Nintendo themselves it became clear that Nintendos entire 3rd party ecosystem is completely fucked up. I dont blame third parties, I dont blame the fans, I blame Nintendo. They act like they still control the industry when they dont. Its all right to look out for your interests but when you dont make ANY concessions for third parties you deserve to fail. Better yet, not even Nintendo cares about 3rd party sales. They just want their own games to sell and fans to gobble up Amiibos. Nothing wrong with that but they shouldnt be surprised no 3rd party is lining up to play by their rules.

As a Nintendo fan, demand more from Nintendo. More features, more hardware, freaking voice chat, analog triggers, fucking demand it. Its that simple. If they release another relatively underpowered console dont moan to 3rd party devs when they inevitably ignore it for the other 2 systems and PC.

We shall have to agree to disagree :)

Right. This is really the obvious solution.  I figure too much of Nintendo's leadership see things as they were in the NES/SNES days when they could command-and-control distribution of titles. The likes of Capcom, Konami, Square, Ubisoft, EA, and Activision couldn't live without Nintendo in that time. But of course we know that's no longer true.

So what's stopping them? A lot of it is that outdated perspective. You can call it pride, arrogance, stupidity. It hurts to admit as Nintendo fan, but everyone knows its true. The other part is the constant push to innovate/differentiate to a fault, sometimes taking head-scratching half-measures with final designs of hardware in the name of short-term cost savings (Virtual Boy, no DVD or blu-ray playback in GC/Wii/WiiU, iffy 3D, WiiU GamePad etc.)

Yeah, Id take you up on that "bet". Define "good fps", then tell me what makes CoD a "bad fps". All baseless, subjective rhetoric and buzzwords. But anything to lift up Nintendo and knock down third parties right?

Agreed. Its pretty childish.

Most western developers abandoned handhelds a long time ago. Mobile is more interesting for them. It's the home console market the most interesting one in that regard.

I would have believed that hardware power is the main excuse for 3rd parties to ignore Nintendo, but the situation of the first two years of the WiiU really proved otherwise. Back in the days when the main competitors were the PS360 and the WiiU, most games could have run on the U as well as on the HD twins.

Most publishers took the chance and released their old games on the new system (Deus Ex, Ninja Gaiden, Batman Arkaham City, Assassins Creed...), just to test the waters. However, part of the problem was exactly that: most people had already played those titles in other systems, or they weren't new enough to compete against recent releases. Granted, some should have sold more (Deus Ex, ACIV...), but some of the best selling titles that got a last gen port (Destiny, GTA V, Far Cry 4, every EA sport, PES, Resident Evil HD...) didn't come to the system, in the monent that Nintendo needed them the most, when they were strugling with HD. Even the games that came (Watch Dogs) arrived late and performed bad as everyone expected. Thus we had the droughts.

Very few studios took the chance and released titles during those droughts, when they could have gotten all the sales. The failure of CoD on those systems was the straw that broke the camel's back, though. If there's a game that sells no matter the time of the release or the state it's in, it's CoD, and it failed two times on the U. I'm sure after that, every studio avoided the system like the plague.

But they shouldn't have! Monster Huntes 3 sold well on the U, but Capcom never tried again, Zombie U almost reached the million, but Ubisoft never made a sequel of that (I'm sure the userbase would have prefered Zombie U2 before Watch Dogs), SE and Namco have a ton of JRPGs on the PS3: Kingdom Hearts titles sell well on Nintendo handhelds, FF remakes/remasters, a Tales of game, Sega could have ported Valkyria Chronicles... , but they didn't port one (or brought them to the west). And someone should have brought sports games, someone! EA tried to boycott the system due to Origin not running on the U, when they could have just kept releasing FIFA, as they did on the Wii! Part of the blame is Nintendo's too. I don't know if a port of GTA V would have been more expensive than the possible profits, but they should have insisted on it, and the same with Bethesda games. Without those titles, the system looked barren during two or three years. And when Nintendo managed to recover, the PS4 and the XBone were out already. The excuse of the weaker hardware was valid after that, but not before.

If something hurt the 3rd pary on the WiiU, was:

-Studios not knowing which titles could make money on the system, thus abandoning it before risking time and money. Some even ignored the machine with some successes achieved, prefering not risking anything instead of pursuing the small but consistent sales some games have, like the Lego games. Also, bad pricing for some games also killed the interest (ehem ME3 more expensive than the MEtrilogy ehem).

-Nintendo not trying to get some key titles to the system (GTA V, Destiny, some Bethesda RPG, if FIFA wasn't avalible, try bringing PES...). Also Nintendo not being able to create content fast enough for the system made it look unappealing, and thus not selling fast enough from the beginning.

-I can't say something about the userbase, because the customer is always right, and if they decide to not purchase, it's their choice. But if they want some genres over others, they could have tried bringing more attention to them, specially now with tons of ways of bringing attention to this matters. Example: OP Rainfall. If that worked with Nintendo, why shouldn't it work with other companies?

Just to be clear, Zombi U never came close to sniffing a million. The game was wildly overtracked by VGChartz, we got actual numbers for it from a NPD leak a while ago I forgot what the actual number was but it was quite mediocre. Ditto for Bayonetta 2.

There's no point in Nintendo really trying to get things like GTA. It just doesn't fit Nintendo's image or brand type and that type of game will never really be a huge seller on a Nintendo console. 

EDIT: The actual Zombi U sales number is 204k per NPD leaks as of April of this year. No where close to even half a million, let alone a full million and that's a game that's been widely discounted for over a year now (I know you can get it here for $19.99 for since last year). Bayonetta 2 is about 162k which is also poor.