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Mensrea on 23 March 2013
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This is an interesting topic. I've thought a lot about this.

Gamecube shouldn't have sold as poorly as it did. It had an incredible stable of classic Nintendo first part, pretty decent third party, a normal extremely comfortable controller, and to top it all off it was powerful. (and pretty damn cheap).

I attribute the Cube's failure to a couple things:

PS2 was dominating in a way that we will never see again. Seriously, PS2 killed everything in it's path. It more than doubled the combined totals of Dreamcast, Gamecube, and Xbox. WIth a system like that, there is not much room for anything else.

Cube had no DVD player, was a more fun design rather than mature. Purple.

Now why do I think that the Wii U won't be the same? A couple reasons:

It's got all the basic media capabilities of any other console. Blu Ray is not what DVD was for the PS2. Some people will see this as a viable option for a streaming box. (Netflix,Amazon, Hulu, Nintendo TV)

It will get some casual sales when the price drops. I think the casual crowd has for the most part moved on from Wii, but some of that 100 million Wii fanbase will migrate. I guarantee it. It won't be anything like the Wii, but I could see 10 million families/elderly/casuals picking up the console when the price drops.

There is no clear winner like the PS2. There really will never be another PS2-esque system. The reason for this, is that more and more gamers are buying more than one console. Back then it was much much more common to own just one console, and that console was the PS2.

Nintendo's franchises have continued to grow as well. Mario Kart is now much bigger than it was back then, as is Smash Bros. They also have NSMB which they didn't have, that sells consistently in the multi millions. 3D mario is also so much bigger now. Add backwards compatibility with the Wii, and Virtual console, and it's just obvious that Nintendo has a lot more content now.

The Wii U is struggling right now, but if it doesn't break 50 million, I will be shocked beyond belief.