I know Nintendo's history with third party developers very well. I also know, if memory serves me right, that the stipulation you say on the mandatory sell threshold no longer holds on Wii U. Different conditions for a different time. I don't know what happens behind back doors, but, it seems to me that Nintendo (publicly) has made a concerted effort this time around to at least try and improve that case (e.g. Ubi, Tecmo, Squeenix, Platinum, etc.). Nintendo in the Wii twilight years has even let other developers touch their property like Other M and now that new Smash Bros. thingy. They've stepped up and published some games that otherwise either may not have existed or may not have appeared in a Nintendo machine. Their eShop business model has been seen as a direct push towards luring Indie developers. If memory serves me right, Nintendo has foregone charging developers for patches too.
Let's sit back and see how it pans out, shall we? Then, when Nintendo's utter collapse and destruction is complete, you can pull out the champagne and celebrate.
All the talk on VC pricing... I was under the impression that NES VC prices during the Wii years was $10.
EDIT:
My bad, just checked some older articles on Nintendo VC pricing. NES games were indeed $5.
SirPrimalform: Are you making up prices? ;)
orcishgamer: Are they somehow not charging a ridiculous premium for ancient games now? When did they have that change of heart?
niniendowarrior: That's the problem. I'm not interested in the 'smart money' talk. I don't know what the third party support for Wii U ends up being. I don't have a crystal ball to figure that out. It's a much more interesting conversation to make once the system has had more time and there is actually concrete data.
orcishgamer: Concrete data is what I'm giving you: historical behavior. This is what is used to model all manner of stuff, people who do it well make a lot of money.
Nintendo's historical third party support has been ass and they do not, by all reports, treat third party devs very well, including having mandatory sell thresholds before they cut you a check for sales. That's right, there are third party devs who sold thousands of copies of their game on the Wii market place and Nintendo did not pay them one red hot cent.
So blah, blah, blah, contract, whatever, Nintendo isn't terribly friendly towards devs it doesn't own or have a large, personal stake in.
I'm not just pulling shit out of my ass and saying this because I want Nintendo to fail for some reason, but because it's happened, and it keeps happening, and so far no one has reported anything anywhere that would suggest it might change for the WiiU.