So you don't even think publishers should make Wii U SKUs, you believe publishers should be investing in exclusive Wii U games tailored to the audience? That's insane.
Third parties have never been successful with porting multiplatform titles to Nintendo platforms. All the successes have been or at least begun as Nintendo exclusives, or titles tailored to the Nintendo audience.
I'm not saying that they should do that for
Wii U specifically given the current state of the platform. However, the "put our games on as many platforms as possible" thing clearly doesn't work with Nintendo platforms. Every time Nintendo and publishers try to make Nintendo platforms more like other platforms in terms of hardware/software, people wind up skipping the Nintendo platform and/or choosing the other platforms.
Why do people always talk about Mass Effect 3 as if it was the only game that bombed on the system? It's the other way around. They're third parties. Free agents. They make the games they make. If you show you've built an audience for that content then it will go to said platform.
If you show there's a lucrative audience then third parties will try to sell to it. There isn't one on the Wii U to justify much.
Agreed. Wii U has no audience, so naturally there is no way for third parties to strategize about how to serve its audience.
However, there was a massive lucrative audience on Wii that most publishers (including Nintendo) wound up largely ignoring and/or throwing crappy games at, even in favor of much less profitable ventures.
Third parties have a history of not giving a shit about Nintendo's audience.
There are two examples in history, and that in the Wii/Nintendo DS. That market has shifted towards other devices since Apple was able to serve their needs better.
GB/GBA/NES were incredibly successful and still targeted the "gamer" market. I would be inclined to say that even N64 was successful in its current market conditions, but it doesn't look as impressive next to PlayStation (which it did outsell in Canada).
Eh, GB was mostly a standout platform rather than a merely successful one because of Tetris/Pokemon, which were definitely not targeting the "gamer" market.
N64 wasn't too far behind PSX in NA, which really surprises me given that it had (I believe) less than a third of the number of titles that PSX did.