I think Mario kart was definitely the title to drive wii u console sales but this christmas the wii u hasn't had an official price drop and marketing was weak. I predicted 10m wii u's at this point believing Nintendo would price cut and really push a mario kart bundle but it hasn't happened. Microsoft have dropped prices, removed kinect, got many exclusives and done some good bundling. They have had a brilliant recover at least in the USA and UK. Nintendo are still selling the white basic model wii u in the UK 18 months after stopping production and its possible Nintendo still have other old stock to sell.
Lets not forget overall the wii u performs at a lower level than ps3 and 360 often struggling to match their frame rates. The wii u is already looking very weak dated hardware and now a complete absence of major third party support surely makes it position even worse. Nintendo needed to do soo much more this holiday season but they have totally failed to achieve this. I think the situation for Nintendo is now much worse than I had hoped for.
I don't know about the USA but in the UK there is now a huge range of very reasonably priced ps4 and xbone titles at retail and some amazing pre-owned prices. Many of Nintendo's own wii u titles seem to keep a high price. That is fine but ultimately a bundle of 3 or 4 games with a console purchase can be as cheap on ps4 and xbone as wii u. Yes the wii u may have cheaper bundles but they are often filled with undesirable games. A wii u bundle with mario kart, smash bros and mario 3d is still an expensive bundle taking the console into ps4/xbone pricing.
Even devices like Amazon's fire tv have gone well past the wii u in cpu performance and are already on a 28nm process not the budget 40nm process of the wii u. Yes of course the wii u gpu is more powerful but still when you see the fire tv running dreamcast games at full speed and you know the wii u couldn't achieve that with 3x1.25 32bit dated powerpc cpus it is quite impressive.
