Helpful i hope.

That's mass production, I doubt there's any problem with giving Nintendo like 100 GPUs of any kind for a trade event. Nintendo simply did not want to be at E3 this year so they just opted to give Zelda the stage. That's not a problem, it's just a computer chip, not reverse engineered alien technology.

The chipset and the specs likely have been locked in since last year with units in Nintendo's R&D at minimum.

Deadpool was also riding the wave of successful Marvel movies and got MASSIVE praise by critics and word of mouth. Not the case at all with Nintendo consoles. They are looking at one complete failure and one console people lost interest in. 

I do think that E3 is still an important time. I think what you refer to as far as social media and company specific events are the future of said E3, but I think having a time frame where all companies come together and show everyone their plans for the next year will never be irrelevant. 

But I'm fine if we disagree on that. 

People have lost interest because their products this generation (aside from a certain number of games, and Nintendo always has brilliant games) simply haven't been very good. You can't generate hype for something that doesn't excite the consumer in the first place.

But even with Deadpool like six months prior to release, no one was talking about it. People started talking about it after the reviews started to come out and the pre-launch hype started to build in a short amount of time.

If you have an exciting product, people will come. If you don't, they won't. Where Nintendo fans I think sometimes lose the forest from the trees is they assume that Mario + Zelda + Metroid = OMG everyone will buy this, when that isn't really (as) impressive to everyone especially when the sales pitch is "you can play these 5 legendary franchises, but in return it means you have basically none of the third party IP you want". People just don't like limited entertainment ecosystems in general.

This is why Windows Phone while subjectively better than iOS and Android in many ways just doesn't gain traction -- it does have all the apps and people don't want to get stuck with the "wrong phone".

Doesn't change the scenerio of it riding off the popularity of its predecessors, which is something Nintendo cannot do. That was the case with PS4. IT rode the success of all its prior consoles, so it didn't need hyped. 

Anyways, we can say Mario + Zelda + Metroid won't make people come, but look at how the Wii U sales were when 3D World released, and Smash 4, and Splatoon. If they had a steady stream of solid titles coming out, I'm pretty sure they would have sold quite a bit more consoles. Would they still be in third? Probably, but it would be a LOT closer. 

This is something I didn't even take into consideration, but you're right.

Wii U sales have been pretty consistently terrible lost-launch onwards.

It only topped 100k in the US for a non-holiday month like once or twice in its entire life cycle which is mind bogglingly bad, I don't think even the Dreamcast did that.

You honestly don't think they got the final specs and at least one console made when it will be in homes in 10 months? Also, dev kits are out right? Nintendo is making games for it right? And they would reveal it in a digital event, so a little hollywood magic can be used even in they don't have the console box ready to show. All they'd need is a working controller which if the previous statements are true they would HAVE to have a few working controllers..... How is it not ready?

Because that 's when the only games worth buying came out. And I'm pretty sure the non holiday release was when Splatoon launched.