Wii U sales trend may be just as expected if we look at Nintendo's home console sales.

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

RolStoppable said:

The NES and Gameboy were once in a lifetime successes too, so Nintendo pulled it off four times already. Too often to write it off as coincidence or non-repeatable. The GBA isn't as clearcut (it had absolutely no viable competition at the time), so its strong sales may have just come from Nintendo commanding a true monopoly over the handheld market at the time.

You're making the mistake that Nintendo success is gimmick-driven when it's not; the fact that old ways of play could succeed at the same level as new ways on both the Wii and DS should make that clear. Your other mistake is the assumption that the Wii U followed the same strategy as the Wii; it only did if you make a very shallow analysis, but if you dig deeper, then the Wii and Wii U are like night and day.

I agree that Sony played it safe. They reverted back to what works for them after the colossal PS3 failure. Sony was smart enough to do what made the PS1 a success. Cerny's "time to triangle" chart illustrates it best. Nintendo, on the other hand, abandoned what works for them and the resulting problems became only worse due to the fact that they tied expensive gimmicks to their eighth generation home console and handheld.

I disagree slightly. The Big 3 all tried what they thought would work, MS and Nintendo thought motion/touch controls would have the smae effect as last time. In contrast, the PS4 is almost completly unrelated to its predecessors, PS1-PS3 was Kutargi's vision including exotic tech so that multiplats would develop for PlayStation rather than other systems, media support to get casaul support. It backfired heavily with the PS3, and so with the PS4, it was ironically the first time "Sony had played it safe"