Offical Sell-in numbers for PS3 - credit to ArmGunar.

[DonFerrari]

Mandalore76 said:

DonFerrari said:

WiiU was forgotten/hidden by Nintendo as fast as possible. And in the way you portray every console is a step to the next anyway.

From what we know PS3 ended up at a major loss when all was said and done, probably much higher than WiiU that was early cut.

The WiiU was discontinued as a product that wasn't selling well.  But, Nintendo pushed it as best they could (advertising early on could/should have been pushed much harder though to be honest) for just over 4 years until the Switch was ready to launch.  Unlike the Virtual Boy which Nintendo dropped in less than a year.  Or Sega's Dreamcast, which was discontinued after only 1 year 7 months in NA (2 years 4 months including Japan).  The Wii U still has a "Games Page" on Nintendo.com showing release dates updated through April of this year, over 2 years after discontinuation (https://www.nintendo.com/games/game-guide/#filter/:q=&dFR[availability][0]=Available%20now&dFR[platform][0]=Wii%20U&indexName=noa_aem_game_en_us_release_des).  Wii U is still featured all over the "My Nintendo" site with discounts for software and digital content (https://my.nintendo.com/reward_categories).  So, no, they haven't "hidden" or erased the Wii U from memory.

Nintendo's consoles typically change more radically from one system to the next than "every console" by comparison.  But, to put it in terms that you might more readily accept, it was a failure that was a necessary failure to get to where Nintendo wanted to go.  Like the PS3 adding the expensive Bluray drive to pave the way for the PS4, the Wii U gamepad was a necessary step towards the portable application of the Switch.

Putting Virtua Boy in the comparison doesn't make much sense since it was a basically a total catastrophe.

And sorry, but Nintendo didn't pushed the best they could. They certainly could have sold it much cheaper and increased number of releases by increasing the size of the team.

I actually don't remember anything outstanding they tried to make the sales of WiiU good. It seemed more like they saw early on that the system was going to do bad and just bought their time until they were ready for Switch (which probably couldn't have been released earlier, not only because it also is successor to 3DS, but also that technology for the affordable price wasn't ready yet), similar to Sony that as soon as they saw PSVita couldn't be a success they just let it die (versus PS3 where they done all they could because they thought it was still possible to sell good).

Anyway that isn't much relevant. The point I wanted to explain initially is why PS3 is considered a BIGGER MONEY LOSSER than WiiU. And that had to do with selling 85M consoles with a lot of them being 100-200 loss per sale, versus WiiU more or less selling 15M for break even.