...
No doubt that Nintendo botched the launch, but the industry is just f'n weird.
What's happening with some publishers is just weird.
I feel like the console games industry can be seen as two different industries.
The first one, and the that's trying to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster model. Teams that put together films don't stay around long. They don't last multiple films. At most you get core groups of two or three people. One person is a production company. Small developers die doing this. Only small core groups survive, and everyone else is contracted to work on a per project basis. This model consolidates power to the publishers. This is the model that EA wants. This is the model that Activision wants. And Blockbusters are cool. Everyone wants to work on them.
The other model is model that died in 80s for film. The small studio model where each studio had to be able to handle - through loans or venture backers - aspects of development and publishing, but the small studios have a real chance of creating something lasting.
Blockbusters push out that other model very effectively over the course of years and decades.
EA wants to see the last place where that model finds a home to fail. They're not making the money they want to there, and it would take userbase development for them to make that money. They're making a bet that if they don't invest the money now, they can help Nintendo fail in the market, and won't have to make that investment later. They're working to consolidate the hollywood model.
The only other side of this is that the "indie" model - the model with no funding that doesn't make any money sort of thrives here. But it doesn't matter to EA, because the indie's don't make money, and if they do, they can usually be bought or at worst cloned.
Maybe Wii U dies in the market. Maybe it doesn't.
I just hope that if they do fail out of the Wii U, they take it as an opportunity to merge the Home and Handheld platforms. Maybe give the 4DS the ability to stream to an HDMI receiver - sort of a backwards Wii U.
R = nintendo lost the casual and core audience and are left with the niche nintendo faithful. 3rd party support is gone and the Wii 1 sales chart was proof that nobody was getting paid off it except mainly big n... they don't need EA... they just need themselves, but need to fix their ways so they don't lose their own niche segment
