Did you expect the Wii U to flop?

[Mythmaker1]

Mummelmann said:

Mythmaker1 said:

Mummelmann said:
Not flop, but I did maintain that it would do considerably worse than the Wii. I did not expect it to perform like it has though.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but I'm honestly curious as to why people are so surprised. Was it that the Wii was doing so well, and people thought the casual audience would stick around? Or did people just have more faith in the Nintendo brand that they thought it wouldn't turn out this way?

For me personally, it was actually more about uncertainty around what Sony and MS would do and the relative lack of faith in the ability to get their brands moving at a brisk pace from the start, leaving a nice window for Nintendo along with almost an entire year alone on the market. I never believed that the Wii's model was sustainable over time, especially given the Wii's immense crash on the market and the record sales plunge it took but I did believe that Nintendo had it in them to manage a decent follow-up if it was properly aimed (it wasn't...), well marketed (nope) and cleverly designed through and through (not so much this either). Up towards 50% of the Wii's lifetime seemed possible if the right choices were made, even with the majority of the Wii's customer base having fled to tablets and phones and social/browser games. In addition to the below link, I have also been chanting about the fall of the dedicated handheld console for many years in here, not a whole lot of people agreed that it was going to happen. And here we are today.

That said; I was really skeptical, especially about the Gamepad and I've been vocal about it ever since. I've written rather extensively about it in the famous UNITY thread (forced market convergence) if you want to have a look. Other than that, here's an example of some doubts concerning the whole Wii U concept: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=4619667

I'd say that that's a fairly good take on the Wii U almost half a year before it launched.

I wasn't too sure about Sony and Microsoft either. I thought they'd take more than a year to outsell the Wii U, less because I thought the Wii U would do better than because I thought they'd sell at or slightly below last gen launches. As far as the Wii U taking advantage of the head start, however, I always assumed that it would perform poorly against competition from the 360 and PS3, simply because thy were firmly established and better supported.

Honestly, if the Wii U had been better designed and marketed, and if Nintendo had done the leg work to get more games on the system, it might have happened as you describe. There's nothing inhereently wrong with the idea, afterall. But from the start it was pretty obvious that wasn't going to happen.