Did Nintendo Miss Their Opportunity By Undercooking the Wii U's Specs?

[Soundwave]

In a way, I think Nintendo really let Sony and Microsoft off the hook here to be honest.

They're both very late with 360/PS3 successors because the last console cycle took so much out of both of them early on that they need these later years to milk profit from aging platforms.

Nintendo made a ton of money off Wii, they really could've screwed Sony especially IMO with a system that was reasonably more powerful than the current HD twins without getting too ridiculous in cost. 

Sure maybe Durango/Orbis would be more powerful still in a year, but in that case, I think a lot of devs would look at the Wii U and say "y'know this platform is a good leap above the PS3/360 and it already has 10-15 million users going for it, lets focus on that, rather than even more expensive platforms with a userbase of 0".

Right now a system that's somewhere truly in between a PS3/360 and the Orbis/Durango which are a year away and likely represent a large bump in development costs ... that's the system the Wii U should be.