Nintendo Land failed to really ignite the Wii U and now we see Game & Wario has flopped in its Japanese debut. The era of the mini-game (much like the guitar/instrument gaming craze) is coming to a close it seems like.
I think the audience has simply had their fill of this type of game. Even on Kinect, Kinect Sports 2 performed considerably less than the first one, and the Star Wars Kinect game (which was basically a Star Wars mini-game-a-thon) also underperformed I think compared to what MS wanted.
After Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort/Wii Fit/Wii Fit 2/Wii Play/Wii Play Motion/Wii Music/Wii Party (phew!) ... who really wants more? and it's part of the reason why Nintendo Land never took off the way Nintendo I think really wanted it to even though it's probably the best "mini game collection" title they've ever done. I'm not even mentioning all the third party stuff like Carnival Games/Raving Rabbids/etc. etc. over the years.
The problem for Nintendo is it looks like they planned the Wii U's first year to rely a lot on these types of mini-game collections, in fact it could be possible almost half of the Wii U's first year releases from Nintendo may wind up being in this style of genre ...
Nintendo Land, Wii Fit U, Wii Party U, Game & Wario, Wii Sports/ U (?) = 5 titles
NSMBU, Pikmin 3, Wonderful 101, Zelda: WW HD, Mario Kart U (?), Yoshi's Epic Yarn = 6 titles
That's a little overkill Nintendo. Unfortunately right now, there's not much Nintendo can do. They may have simply bet on the wrong software horse on top of making a litany of poor hardware design decisions and not being able to get games out on time on top of that. Simply put -- just about everything that could go wrong for Nintendo, has. They've taken a left turn every time they should've turned right and vice versa.
