I don't think anyone's crying conspiracy here. Seems like a lot of the defense force posts have flat out said Wii U has problems. The issue isn't the article itself, but the fact its only one account of one short window in the console's development life.
Add that to the fact that initially the majority of posters in this thread basically used the article to reaffirm their opinions of the console and decided to guffaw and snark instead of having actual conversation. This all brews up to a weird discussion arguing semantics for the purpose of being smug while losing sight of what the bigger picture is: Wii U's launch had a lot of problems but a lot of them are smoothed out now, as with any launch.
Basically it's just another console with shaky development at launch due to different architecture. Some people decided to take this at face value and used the typical Nintendoomed rhetoric initially but now it seems like actual conversation is beginning to prevail.
A lot of this could have been avoided if the article added some sort of counterpoint or clarification, but nothing's perfect.
But that's not entirely true. We have reports of problems dealing with Nintendo after launch too. And the CPU problem as noted has not actually evaporated - the CPU is simply bad, bad stuff.
But as I noted in the thread earlier, the real disparity seems to be the reports we get from indie devs - who almost universally say there was a real change with how easy Nintendo was to deal with for Wii U - and developers who work WITH Nintendo in a partnership of sorts (say, Platinum Games), and AAA developers who routinely go on record to say their relations with Nintendo is problematic for any number of reasons.
I think part of the reason is simple,
as Nintendo themselves stated clearly:
"Following and imitating others is the kind of reasoning that Nintendo tries to avoid the most, and while we certainly do not have a negative attitude toward strengthening our ties with third-party publishers, employing the same methodology as the other manufacturers would only lead to the most simplistic competitive approaches, such as price wars or money-giving that would never end. We would like to take a unique approach of our own and build sustainable relationships with our third-party publishers."
In other words, as the article states, Nintendo refuses to offer financial incentives to major third party developers. This is essentially Nintendo taking the basketball home and refusing to play. As we can see, the harmful repercussions of not at all participating in this sort of thing means when things get bad, they get
really bad.
Of course, that's not the only problem. Major third party publishers/developers have an expectation of porting their games easily across as many platforms. Due once again to Nintendo's strategic choice to not fight the power game again, developers are once more tasked with having to create an entirely unique version of the game just to get it to run on Wii U, to say nothing of trying to take advantage of the screen in some way. This costs extra time and money that they are certainly not going to spend with the userbase as abysmal as it is.
There are other reasons too (I'm very curious to see if this communication problem persists with major developers), and they combine to stifle Nintendo's console growth. Until Nintendo is willing to suck in that pride and accept they have to be a LITTLE like their competitors to win support, they're going to keep facing this wall.
