Why do you think the Wii U will fail, when the 3DS came out of a similar horrible slump and even the Vita has stuck in the fight?

[Mummelmann]

1: Base appeal, the 3DS always had some appeal, the Wii U does not. It is aimed at no one in particular and at everyone, all at once and has a core design that does not appeal to any one market. The Gamepad was a big part of this.

2: Competition, the 3DS basically has/had no competition since the Vita is a massive slug that barely moves and the PSP was basically short-sticked by everyone when the Vita arrived.

3: Price and value for money, in the home console market, the Wii U is percieved as expensive and unimpressive on specs, dedicated handhelds have rarely had this problem.

4: Nintendo's overall situation, Nintendo's finances were very good when the 3DS launched, which meant that they had a lot of wiggle room for price cuts and advertisement even if the 3DS was already sold at a loss, they do not have that liberty now since they're losing a lot of money overall.

5: Competing with two generations at once; this is somewhat of a wild card but I don't understad why people assume that the PS4 and Xbox One will do Nintendo any good, they will basically have twice as many competing consoles.

6: Support, the 3DS came off of the massively popular DS, which not only sold tons of hardware but also moved 3rd party software like there was no tomorrow. The Wii U does not have this luxury, the Wii had really poor 3rd party support and the Wii U is destined to carry on this tradition and have it even worse since the hardware sales are so bad to boot.

7: In-house development cycle and features/services; the Wii U is Nintendo's first HD console, they are not adapted to develoing HD games yet, the budgets are a lot bigger and the development cycles greatly extended. To top it all off, Nintendo have no pedigree and almost no allies when it comes to online and remote services and their Gamepad is seen mostly as a bulky, unwieldly knock-off of a tablet device.
They can't simply spew out titles at a high rate to stem the slow sales, the cost is high and the development more time consuming, they are also having massive issues with installs, slow OS and servers for patch downloads, a lot of features are still not operational and they lack the media capabilities of the coming PS4 and Xbox One.

In short; the 3DS and Wii U situations are vastly, vastly different and cannot be compared at all. The handheld market and the home console market are just too different, Nintendo are having financial issues and they lack development efficency and knowledge/pedigree with online components and media capability, they have basically no 3rd party support to help them and even if the managed to reduce the price greatly, they would still be trying to sell a product no one seems to want, the 3DS never had that issue, it had good appeal allround.

People like to use the 3DS as an example of how the Wii U can bounce back and do well. It doesn't work that way, not any more than one can doom the PS4 because the Vita is failing, it's a really poor argument at best. I suppose it would depend on ones definition of "do well" but in my opinion and by all logic, the Wii U is destined for "well below greatness" at the very least, regardless of what Nintendo comes up with. The Wii U was a mistake in design, launch and idea, nothing can retroactively change that.