Platinum, Monolith, Retro, any great developer forced to make games no one will buy.
Obviously flops will happen on any platform, but with the Wii U it's a 100% chance your game is gonna flop without Zelda/Mario.
I think you're vastly overestimating the importance of sales here. Nintendo are the ones writing the checks. They enabled Kamiya to make the quirky super-hero game he wanted to make, and the rest of Platinum to make a sequel that Sega had declined them support for. Monolith Soft, a first party studio, seem happy where they are. They get the creative and financial freedom they didn't have at Square, and my impressions from Takahashi in interviews is that he's pretty much on the same philosophical wave-length as Iwata & Co. when it comes to game development. My assertion is that all of these things (and more) would likely be of greater matter than the numbers to the creative talent. Stellar sales of course
doesn't hurt, but it's not like Nintendo are burying all the discs in the desert after the project is done. Their games get plenty of exposure world-wide, and sell in the hundreds of thousands.
Everything about the game got better so really the only conclusion to draw is Wii U screwed Tropical Freeze.
I'd argue it was Nintendo who screwed Tropical Freeze, because it was a terribly timed release.
and I know this is Nintendo fans celebrating sales |OT| so I'm sorry to disrupt your discussion. I just thought those numbers were ridiculously low for two big releases whereas PS4 barely had anything chart.
What is going on here lol.