Ubisoft Is Sitting On Unreleased Wii U Games

It’s bad enough when you hear that companies aren’t making games because the Wii U is struggling to find an audience. What’s even worse? Hearing that completed games are for Nintendo’s latest home console being held back because of poor sales.

https://lastchance.cc/nintendos-toughest-year-ever-starts-pretty-much-now-1503448737%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says that’s just what the company is doing, in an interview with Polygon. (On Spike’s E3 webcast earlier tonight, Guillemot confirmed that there is a family-friendly Wii U exclusive that’s in development.) The thinking appears to be that, even at least one such Wii U game has been completed, the hardware doesn’t have a big enough user base to justify the money that they’d spend on marketing:

“We have another couple of products that we are waiting to launch, specifically we have one game that we wait for the machine to be more mass market to launch.”

“We don’t have a number. We need the sales to increase so it becomes more and more mass market then we will have the volume that will justify massive marketing and TV marketing.”

Anybody who’s tracked Ubisoft’s relationship with the Wii U will remember this philosophy being part of the reason that Rayman Origins went from being a Wii U exclusive to a multiplatform release. As for ZombiU, one of the publisher’s better received Wii U-only titles, any future for the hybrid zombie game seems to be dim:

https://lastchance.cc/ubisoft-to-nintendo-sell-more-systems-and-well-make-m-512860061%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

“I think it was so adapted to the Wii U so (bringing it to another platform) would be difficult to do. Maybe it will come to other platforms, but not as a full game. It was really developed for that type of machine.”