First and foremost OP, the Wii and Wii U are two consoles serving two completely different crowds. The Wii was a casual fad. They only wanted the casual games and it boosted first party sales. It bundles galore.
Second of all Nintendo is doing fine but not reaching where they want to be (despite having a year head start) because they have no third party and why does Nintendo not have third party? Easy.
Nintendo has no third party because they suck at working together with third party. They don't even address their concerns or needs at all. Nintendo is all about Nintendo and then third parties later. In 2011 third party devs were starting to demand specific hardware saying that a wave of new games for the next gen were going to need at least 8GB of ram and just overall more powerful GPU than the last gens. Cliffy B of Epic, Ubisoft and some others spoke out about it. NIntendo as usual made the most cheap and affordable hardware that they could so they could jump out of the gate and pass the last gen consoles. They went boasting on the media and the media served them a handful of doubt because it was said that the other next gen consoles were rumored to be quite powerful. Nintendo wanted to associate themselves with the COD franchise saying they were the best device and most powerful device to get the game. Of course they were right, but no one cared because once the PS4 showed up on February at the Sony experience in 2013 no body gave a damn about the Wii U version because Nintendo skimped on the details of the Wii U by not working with third party.
How the hell are you going to make a core friendly console and leave out the developer base the core mostly tend to support? WTH?
No one is going to dumb down their games for the company who has been the most ignorant to them since the 90's.
Oh and now Nintendo wants to find the best graphics architects for their next gen console?
Whose moves tell the story OP? Whose moves?
Nintendo loved the Wii money, but they expressed regret about losing that potential core COD audience and the profitabilty off of third party that MS and Sony had. They were never the it console to when the real competitions were happening outside of Super Smash.
