This is the Problem(Main) of the Wii U

[Soundwave]

If smartphones/tablets (or at least gaming on those devices) didn't exist I think Wii U would have done OK. Nothing spectacular, but alright.

It would've filled the need for novice/entry level gamers to have something to play on, and Nintendo would've gotten past the early hiccups in the gen.

But they lost the casuals to smartphones/tablets which have free games that are (by and large) even easier to play than Wii/Kinect games, more convinenant, more plentiful (thousands of choices), and are free.

Nintendo just can't compete with that, but they compounded the problem with piss poor marketing. But good marketing would be just like putting lipstick on a pig ... it's still a pig.

Nintendo never really even should have tried to make a successor to the Wii in hindsight. They should have just rebooted the Wii with HD capable graphics (same fidelity though) and spun off the brand into a 100% casual gaming/fitness brand for $99.99 (hardware), made it digital only with $19.99/game downloads.

Then they could have made a separate hardware line that was more of a real successor to the NES-SNES-N64-GameCube lineage and aimed at people who want to play deeper, more advanced games and care about things like higher end graphics, third party IPs, the more advanced Nintendo franchises like 3D Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.

Trying to make a platform that could keep casuals interested in the face of huge competetion from smart devices and still have a system that isn't so casual that it turns off anyone interested in more deep gaming experiences was always kind of like mixing oil with water. They're just better left apart.