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

[Mr Khan]

ICStats said:

RolStoppable said:
It's simple, really. Everytime Nintendo decides to fight over the existing market, their sales decline. That's because they turn off a good chunk of their audience in the process. The Wii only looks like the only anomaly, because the NES is the starting point. If the NES were in the middle, it would be an anomaly too. Both the NES and Wii were about making gaming more popular, so the hardware and software was designed accordingly. With the other four systems Nintendo didn't bother to ask how they can get more people to play video games. The most recent one, the Wii U, was all about winning third parties and the hardcore gamer back, i.e. the existing market (see E3 2011 reveal).

You can apply the same thing to the handheld market. Nintendo's sales kept rising as long as they didn't get into a fight with other companies and let them dictate how things are done. The GBA sold only 80m, but it did it in six years as opposed to the 120m of the GB/GBC in twelve years; and the DS did 150m in seven years. But then came the 3DS and Nintendo was all about going after the PSP market; suddenly it wasn't about making video games more popular, but getting a bigger chunk of the teenager demographic which was Nintendo's weakest point (and Sony's strongest). The irony is that while Nintendo succeeded at taking notable chunks of Sony's market (Monster Hunter exclusivity being an important piece of the puzzle), they are losing out everywhere else, hence the decline. That should make you realize how important the DS was. Sony was readying the PSP, yet Nintendo decided that they won't go to war. They didn't fall into that trap, even though the threat was immense.

Ok, I can buy that Nintendo has had more success when they worked on making gaming more popular instead of competing head-to-head.

The issue though is it's not that easy to replicate it.  To have success like DS & Wii it's not just about not making mistakes, and having the right mindset.  It took right ideas at the right time, and a bit of luck.

Nintendo achieved what seems like once in a lifetime success on TWO devices at the same time (DS & Wii) so I think Nintendo (and the world) thought that they had the magic touch.  They have the infalliable talent to keep doing that again and again.  They would just play to their own beat, make another low power (~35 Watt) console with a new way to play (2nd screen) and repeat the Wii's success.  Only they can't, it's not going to be easy to find that unique feature (aka gimmick) again.  Seems obvious in hindsight that relying on something new without having a competitive fallback is a super risky strategy.

Contrast to the PS4 which Sony played as safe as possible in terms of innovation.  Instead they worked on checking all the boxes, making game developers happy and focusing on what core gamers are asking for as #1 priority, while new things, PS Now Cloud & VR are not day 1 core things forced on users.

The gimmick is about the games, though. You have to think about what kind of games people want to play, and then build a gimmick that enables that. Wii U's design philosophy seemed to put the cart before the horse (resolving that people might want off-screen play, but then how do we make that meaningful?) Whereas with Wii you can see games like Wii Sports or Metroid Prime 3 making meaningful, early contributions. A checkbox approach is a good, safe way to make a console perform well, but to build a system that will revolve around true, killer apps, you need to think about software design first.

Wii U, really didn't do that.