Are you impressed or not impressed with Wii U sales?

[Mazty]

HappySqurriel said:

Mazty said:

Thing is, I can't see the Wii U being dominant whatsoever in the next few years, or even ever. We've yet to see it demonstate anything that puts it a generation ahead of the existing consoles and therefore gamers and customers will not want it as it offers nothing worth the asking price. If MS simply release a more powerful xbox that can kick out a much prettier CoD, that will crush the Wii U. Don't get me wrong, I hate CoD, but that crowd is a very dominant one in terms of marketing. 
Sony and MS would have to essentially release piss poor consoles, and on top of that, the steam box would have to be dire, for the Wii U to be a market leader. I just can't see that happening. 

People said exactly the same things about the Nintendo DS, 3DS and Wii ...

Nintendo is not run by morons, they have a fairly good picture of what Sony, Microsoft, and Valve can do and they felt confident with their approach with the Wii U. In my opinion, the likely reason for this is that the cost of producing a system that is significantly more powerful than the Wii U is too expensive to make a viable product and game development costs are too high to make these games profitable; and Nintendo is happy to let Sony and Microsoft product $500 or $600 systems with $70 to $80 games.

The Steambox will be interesting but I suspect it will be much more expensive up front that a typical game console because it will be manufactured by third parties who sell it for a profit; and a system that Microsoft would manufacture for $550 to sell for $400 will be sold as a Steam box for $700.

The 3DS had massive price issues to begin with...
The Wii however had the "cool gadget" factor going for it. Nowadays that belongs to smartphones and tablets. The people who bought the wii for that reason have it now as a dust gatherer and certainly aren't looking for an upgrade. The wii u does not appeal to the casual market that invested so heavily in the wii, nor to the gamer audience as it offers the same games and a few casual titles. On top of this there is the marketting issue that people are not clear what it is  - many think it's just a new pad rather then a new console. 
If Steambox doesn't run windows, and is a mini-itx format, it could very easily cost $550 and be damn powerful as well. The advantage they'd have is bulk buying components if they aren't using customised parts.