As a "how we got here", this is a very good read. Yamauchi-era Nintendo made a lot of decisions that third party developers really didn't like. I personally feel this is still a surprisingly large part of why there is still this problem today. John Carmack for example has detailed some of the problems he had with them, and I believe has said that it put him off developing anything for them for a while, although now he seems to have mostly gotten over that.



Things should be improving now, Nintendo really do seem to have tried to make themselves friendlier to third parties. Yet, the only real change we are seeing is from indie developers. WiiU third party support was going south real fast, long before the thing even launched (and therefore long before "no sales" ever became a relevant counterpoint). EA being the most notable example of this.



No, I do not believe it is a power issue, and I don't believe it was the case with the Wii either. Instead, I believe third parties are mostly targeting a target market that Wii/WiiU owners do not match up all that much with. The "hardcore" crowd will be heading towards consoles where games like CoD or Battlefield sell significantly more, and those consoles are also where third parties target.



Note, when that isn't an issue, sometimes you see it going the other way around. Monster Hunter Tri became a Wii game because a PS3 version of the game would have cost significantly more money.