Are you saying there's not an audience for FPS's among Wii owners? Pretty sure a million + COD sales prove you wrong. Small in comparison to total COD sales, yes, but if you can't make money off a port with that kind of potential sales... you are bad at business?
This is pretty bad news for Nintendo - Battlefield is one of EA's tentpole releases. It could conceivably have 2-3 MORE releases after this one during the next gen. EA / DICE are essentially deciding to skip all those potential sales (which they must forecast as being not that many!)
I think the point is a little different than that. You can't just look at the overall sales of a console and imagine that each one is a unique customer. There were people with all three consoles, Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360, despite each one of those consoles counting as a sale that customer is not likely to buy the same game across all 3 platforms. Now concerning people who own two consoles do you think most people own a 360 and PS3 or would you say it instead looks more like PS3 and Wii versus Xbox 360 and Wii? Most gamers who own a Wii likely have another console as well and thus despite being part of the Wii's install base is not necessarily a potential buyer of a multiplatform game because they're more likely to buy it on their other system. I think the Wii U is going to follow a similar path although this time without much of the large casual market that its predecessor wooed.
The difference between the Wii U and the Gamecube I feel though will be your friends list. When the Gamecube was around the PS2 also didn't really have an online presence(not counting shit like Frequency(PS2) or PS:O(NGC)) and the Xbox was the only system that had it. If a multiplat came out and you were say a PS2 and Gamecube owner then the choice really could go either way, sometimes the Gamecube version was better and neither the PS2 or the Gamecube had online so buy whichever version you want. In the 360 and PS3 era they both have online now, and the Wii largely did not and for those that did it was relatively clunky and game specific. Now people who had multiple consoles had a relatively clear decision on which version to buy based on both graphics and online and neither was in the Wii's favor.
The problem I think is that even if Nintendo had released a system on par with the PS4 or Durango that they still would be in a similar situation. I would be happier mind you because I want a better looking Zelda and Metroid than what I will end up getting but I think business wise the result would be the same. For the last 2 generations third party companies have tried, with little to no success, to sell their games on Nintendo platforms and it hasn't worked often. This is because the Nintendo system is the "and" system for most people. Their second system(no matter what order it's actually bought in). Before on-line it was just out of necessity, Nintendo had fallen to third place in mindshare, third parties weren't really supporting them as much as the others and if they wanted their Nintendo games they also had to buy the Nintendo system. Then online and the Wii happened and now they were both technologically behind and behind on on-line and once again the consumer was forced to keep their Nintendo system as the "and" console. I think on-line had a hand in basically solidifying people's position on which company they support as their primary console.
Now if they had found some way to keep the casuals that they had got with the Wii and actually convert them into honest to goodness longterm gamers the situation might be different. Those would be new, unique customers that they could only get by targeting the Wii U. But instead essentially everyone with a Nintendo system will pretty much also have a Sony or Microsoft console or a PC. They pretty much cover any potential purchaser anyways regardless of whether they target the Nintendo platform or not. Maybe, maybe if they had made a much stronger push into on-line with the Wii to the point that multi-console owners had a huge on-line friend group on the Wii as well perhaps things might be a little different too.
But honestly, I think Nintendo has missed their chance at ever becoming truly second again. This doesn't mean I don't think they can make money, I think they can sell tens of millions of systems and Mario, Zelda and the like can continue selling in the 10's of millions as well but I think from here on out unless Sony or MS just folds that Nintendo will always be the "and" console from here on out and they have no way of changing that themselves.
*excluding the casual market whom conceivably could be tapped again if they were shown something exciting and Nintendo could in theory become their primary console again but they're hard to get and not reliable as long term customers.
