Let's face it, Breath of the Wild is most likely not coming to Wii U. They'll make it Switch exclusive to try to force Wii U owners to upgrade.

I think the reason for these ports is simply that alot of people didnt have a chance to play them since they didnt own a Wii U and it allows these teams to get another game out quicker.

Looking at EAD Group 2, it seems like they can work on 2-3 SD games or 1 HD & 1 SD at a time.

Animal Crossing: Wild World, Wii Sports & Wii Play all released between November 2005 & December 2006

Wii Music, Animal Crossing: City Folk & Wii Sports Resort all released between July 2008 & June 2009

Nintendo Land & Animal Crossing: New Leaf both released during holiday 2012

Splatoon & Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer both released in mid-2015.

The question is can they work on 2 big HD projects at once? Im not so sure they can, so if they went right to work on a full fledged sequel to Splatoon that releases late 2017 than it might not be until late 2019 that we get a new Animal Crossing or vice versa. By going with a enhanced port rather than a sequel perhaps we could see Splatoon 1.5 in early 2017 followed by a new Animal Crossing in holiday 2018.

Same goes for Sakurai and Smash, he has stated he prefers to work on other projects between Smash releases. Lets say he started work on a new game right after Smash DLC was finished (early this year) so a perhaps a new game sometime in 2018 (2-3 year dev cycle) followed by Smash 5 in 2020/2021. Thats too late to get smash bros on the system. By releasing Smash Bros Complete Edition with all DLC included and a couple extra characters/stages he gets it out in 2017 then goes on to make another game that releases in 2019.

Obviously the same applies with Zelda since the series now seems to go 5-6 years between 3D entries. If BotW remained Wii U exclusive and released in 2016 than it would be 2021 before Switch recieved a Zelda game.

Hardcores: Bleh! Puke out of the tear ducts. Swallow and smile. Casuals: What's a Splatoon? Mostly a launch negative. Only Nintendo can yank the carpet from your feet this many times. Who was REALLY ready for another BOTW delay? Who was Really, REALLY ready for it? It's kinda a pattern, but you hope it won't repeat again. AGAIN.. It's not all bad. But really. Really.

I just can't imagine what kind of excuses are the apologists going to say to defend this.

When did you buy it and what games convinced you to do so?

if true, what a mistake. The launch trailer has mainly Zelda being played for gods sake. Nintendo fans like me are just going to wait to pick up a Switch if Zelda isn't coming out for a while. Nintendo should know better

If they release it on launchday the major problem would be that no one are interested in 3rd-party games the next few weeks. That will give a very bad signal to 3rd-parties.

Launch in 2012 and around 2015.

They'll come up with something. There is nothing some fans won't try to defend and justify.

What is the truth?