It would have made a huge difference mainly because it wouldn't have gained so much negativity around the console.

Which is exactly why 3DS is over 50 million and growing.......

That metacriti in your is is awesome.

3DS also has Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Monster Hunter, Youkai Watch, + tons of other japanese games. Never mind that I think he's talking about home consoles, but the 3DS has better support than the Wii U.

the difference would be about 5mil less units solds

I was part of the problem i.e a sheep that saw all the negative articles and jumped on the bashing wagon. Now I own a Wii U, love it and feel like an idiot for falling for the nonsense. Nintendo always fail at pointing out a consoles strong points. That's up to people to people contact and hear say like the Wii's success. The Wii U was bad mouthed so much, that people hated it for no clear reason and it's strong points are still missed by some people.

This. There would be no need for bashing Wii U like everyone was doing after launch if this was the Launch Wii U. It would be packed with a great library and with its improved OS and features it would have answered most of the critics right out of the box. It would have already won the war of perception without taking any damage, and that would have been just as big for them than anything else.

Yeah but by your logic, the Gamecube should've sold the same as the GBA. 

People are not as picky with handhelds, handhelds have traditionally lower software attach rates because people are OK with just buying 1 or 2 handheld games a year and using that as their go-to for when they have a plane ride/bus ride/down time (although of course we are seeing this being radically altered by smart devices). 

Consoles are a different beast. People don't want speciality consoles with a certain slice of some genres/game types. It never has worked even against Nintendo ... Sega had the Master System which had some really cool/great 1st party exclusives, but the NES was the Playstation of its time with all the third party support and they routed Sega as a result. 

What people look for in a home console is a conduit to the widest variety of content that can satisfy their entire gaming needs, Nintendo consoles have not offered that in a long time. 

With respect to the 3DS too, I think its probably lucky that Nintendo didn't wait any longer to launch the 3DS than they did, because the userbase could be a good deal smaller. I also don't think the 3DS has really even 45 million unique users, a lot of that number is inflated by people who buy multiple revisions (so much so that Nintendo doesn't even bother to ship the New 3DS with an AC adaptor) or kids in households where each sibling has their own 3DS but they share the games vs. having only one console for the household. 

I'm sure any console would've started off better with 2+ years worth of exclusives.

Well he added etc to the end of his list so I assumed he was simply referring to Nintendo franchises as a whole. As for Monster Hunter, it's only a strong seller in Japan and Youkai Watch is only in Japan so that doesn't explain why 3DS is so much more popular in non-Japan regions.

My point is that the market for a Nintendo device is larger than Wii U levels if done correctly. Wii U is $300 and up until this point it has basically averaged one major 1st party per quarter. Too high of a price with too low of software support.

Ya mobile has taken alot of the casual audience and the mainstream market is on PS/XB but in some ways 3DS is Wii U's biggest competitor. The main selling point for both is Nintendo's 1st party offerings but 3DS hardware/software is nearly half as expensive as Wii U and 3DS has a larger selection of said titles making it a more attractive purchase for people interested in Nintendo franchises.