French publisher Ubisoft is the biggest third party supporter of the Wii U in terms of games. Ubisoft already has 9 Wii U games in development, 7 of which are slated to be launch titles. Recently speaking to investors, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that Nintendo has “created something good” with the Wii U and they expect the console to be successful. He added that Nintendo is a company that takes a lot of risks with the systems and games they create. Which is true of course — Nintendo took a huge risk with the Wii, opting for motion controls and innovation when others simply released more powerful hardware.
Ubisoft’s CEO recently told analysts that while the company is creating lots of games for the Wii U, most of those are ports from existing titles. And porting a game to the Wii U costs less than $1 million, according to Ubisoft. This means that the company isn’t taking a big financial risk bringing its franchises to the new console. In order to recoup the costs of porting a Wii U game, a game only has to sell about 25,000 copies on the new system. Despite the ports, Ubisoft is so far the only third party publisher to bring original games to the Wii U: the survival horror shooter ZombiU, and the 2D platformer Rayman Legends.
For more, check out the full list of Ubisoft Wii U games.