Mature games simply don’t sell on Wii U, according to Ubisoft — the company behind Watch Dogs and the hugely successful Assassin’s Creed franchise.
Ubisoft chief executive officer Yves Guillemot told Game Informer that Wii U owners just aren’t buying enough of its mature-rated games to warrant releasing them on Nintendo’s home console. So after the open-world hacking title Watch Dogs, which is still scheduled for release on Wii U at some point this year — way after it appeared on almost every other platform — Ubisoft will scale back its Wii U output significantly.
That means no more Assassin’s Creed titles appearing on Wii U and no sequel to the underrated zombie-survival game ZombiU.
“It’s very simple,” said Guillemot. “What we see is that Nintendo customers don’t buy Assassin’s Creed. Last year, we sold in very small numbers.”
Instead of releasing its mature titles on Wii U, Ubisoft will focus on the “types of games” that interest Wii U owners. “What we see is that they are very interested in Just Dance,” said Guillemot, “very interested by other kinds of games.”
Guilllemot confirmed that Watch Dogs is still coming to Wii U but said, “It will be the only mature game we publish on it.”
The fact that only 3 percent of Ubisoft’s game sales in the last financial year were on Wii U may help explain the publisher’s lack of enthusiasm for the struggling system.
Above: Wii U accounted for just 3 percent of Ubisoft’s sales last year.
Despite a recent resurgence in Wii U console sales, due partly to the success of flagship racing title Mario Kart 8, the console has failed to build momentum over the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, both of which released a year later, in 2013. In fact, Sony’s PS4 outsold the Wii U by May this year while Microsoft hasn’t volunteered sales figures for the Xbox One yet.
Guillemot also revealed that Ubisoft will be reducing support for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 after this year. “What we see is that this year is still fine for the PS3 and 360,” he said, “but next year, because they are selling very quickly, we’ll move to the new hardware.
“After 2015, it will be hard for us to create games for those systems.”