I am not convinced that Nintendo has put in enough effort to make WiiU a success. Traditionally Nintendo has lacked a strong first party presence at launch and I view that as a major mistake. Nintendo ever since N64 has put such a huge emphasis on giving third parties a chance to sell their software without competing with Nintendo's own.
Yes Nintendo's software out guns third parties big time. But by sitting by and letting third parties launch your platform your in big trouble. Why? Because third parties are not reliable look at 3DS other then Street Fighter was their a single A+ game from a third party? Let alone an AAA game? Some may consider GhostRecon and DOA A+ games however neither were actually the highest quality. GhostRecon was built cheaply it looked like a GBA game in 3D. Pixelated crap with low textures and honestly while pretty fun you could tell UbiSoft cut corners. Fact is nobody has released an actual very high quality game on 3DS.
3DS suffered largely due to lack of high quality software. In the end if their aren't any high quality titles available people won't buy the hardware. If people don't buy the hardware they won't buy the third party software either. With WiiU it appears yet again that Nintendo is relying entirely on third parties to launch the hardware, having only mentioned 3 first party titles during the whole E3 conference and of those three only one is actually deep in development to our knowledge (Pikmin3).
In fact I think Nintendo is screwed software wise. They couldn't do any better however without expanding. They couldn't cease all Wii development in favor of WiiU because then Wii wouldn't sell this holiday season and with Nintendo losing money to 3DS Nintendo needs the Wii hardware sales to keep it afloat. But they also had to support 3DS in a big way the lack of software was killing the platform and Nintendo had to divert a lot of assets to 3DS software development. Throw in a few DS titles and you'll notice they have very little assets left.
Nintendo at best could have 5 or so first party titles in the works for WiiU. I expect 2 or so within the launch window which is very bad. I don't think Nintendo has the resources to bring us more then 5 games within the launch window let alone launch day. They are relying almost entirely on third parties to sell the WiiU. This is bad because while UbiSoft announced an exclusive and other publishers have publicly said they will have software available none of the third parties are likely to offer a solid A+ exclusive. Without a third party A+ exclusive will Nintendo's 2 or so launch titles have what it takes to sell the system. One of the launch titles is likely going to be Pikmin3 but that title does not have what it takes to push the WiiU hardware.
I still think the only way for Nintendo to sell nearly as many hardware units as last generation and see anywhere near the financial success is if they expand. Nintendo hasn't made huge expansions in years despite all the financial growth they didn't grow the company. To support those kinds of finances you need the infrastructure and Nintendo doesn't have that infrastructure. They can't support 4 platforms at once with their current resources.
I think Nintendo needs an additional 3-4 internal studios whether acquired or built from the ground up. They also need to liscense out some of their properties to other developers. This would enable them to have adequate first party software on the platform. Nintendo also needs to stop worrying about their first party software dominating the third party software, it is inevitable and holding off only hurts hardware sales which in turn effect third party software sales as well. In fact competition brings up quality and if third parties know the WiiU is a good platform and will sell a lot of software they will increase the quality of their software to compete!
