Who exactly was Nintendo's primary target audience with the Wii U?

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Louie said:
The target audience was Nintendo's ego.

It was aimed at no one, to be honest. The gamepad is more hardcore than the PS and Xbox controller. Some games were clearly meant for the mass market (unfortunately they didn't put any effort into them), but at the same time they tried to get "hardcore" third party games and put all their energy into stuff like Pikmin 3, which didn't sell on Gamecube either. The hardware itself was designed with people in mind who don't care about graphics, but the packaged product was placed in a price range that said "hardcore only". Kinda like a computer manufacturer that didn't know if their next product was supposed to be a home computer or a laptop, so they made a fridge.

 

RolStoppable said:
Nintendo's developers. Let them make what they want to make. Due to the success of the Wii and DS, there was no serious concern that that might go wrong. People would buy brandnames, they thought.

The business side might have still insisted that there are certain games, like a NSMB at launch, but for the most part Nintendo's developers got to fool around. If it had been up to the developers, there would have been no Wii Sports at all. But after the console had tanked, the business side pushed for Wii Sports in some form, hence why by the end of 2013 there was tennis and bowling in a download-only form. It was utter desperation to somehow still salvage the Wii U.

You know how Shigeru Miyamoto explains why certain IPs don't get sequels? He doesn't want to make them if he can't do anything new with them, simply providing an improved version of more of the same is too boring to him. That's why Star Fox Zero is the way it is, it wouldn't exist otherwise. That's why the Wii U used a drastically different controller than the Wii despite the Wii being Nintendo's most successful home console; Miyamoto isn't concerned about what people like, he puts what he wants to make above everything else. As Nintendo's general producer he had oversight over all games that Nintendo made, as well as a big say in the hardware that Nintendo creates.

If you want a group of consumers as answer to the thread, then it's people who are willing to buy whatever experiments Nintendo puts out. That's not too big of a pool of people though, because the majority of video game consumers have certain expectations when it comes to brandnames and when the expectations aren't fulfilled or outright betrayed, they won't buy at all.

 

Ganoncrotch said:
The kind of gamer who is perfectly fine with sitting down with a console which had less internal storage available to games than my N-Gage had but they countered that by not daring release games for it at a rate where you might need to have more than 1-2 of them installed and updated at the same time.

Also in terms of power they seen that the main rival in terms of power for the Wii was the PS3 and Xbox360 so they designed the console to be marginally more powerful than those systems (in some aspects, not harddrive again QQ) was just a shame that the X1 and PS4 were coming around the corner with upgrades for 3rd party games such as 16x more RAM under the hood than their older brothers, basically instantly murdering the idea of easy ports to the Wii-U of games directed at the Core gamers they hoped for.

And finally it was aimed at people who would be fine to just sit and wait while they fumbled about, a 2015 with less than 20 seconds of the Wii-U Zelda game shown, a 2016 with the sad news that game isn't coming til mar 2017 and even then... the Wii-U will be the inferior place to play the thing, a sequel to the 3DS handheld Mario Title.... A Toad game! a 3 year in the making reboot/remake of Lylat Wars,

Damn... this got ranty, I think for me the Wii-U itself was not the issue in terms of Power/Gamepad though, I think the number 1 issue which happened to the Wii-U was Nintendo simply were not able to support a HD console, the jump to designing worlds with assets over 480p clearly dealt them a major knock and if the NX is going to be a true 1080p system I think unless there is major changes... or recruitment going on at Nintendo, expecting it to have anything other than a trickle of games is foolhardy.

(Unless it ends up having that 3ds cartridge port rumour which was going around the place and on day one it literally allows you to play the entire 3ds library on the big screen possibly with tidied up AA added everywhere to keep the image bearable on the big screens, that would be one amazing library on day 1 of a console.)



TL:DR - Ninty failed at HD games, utterly failed.

Very good posts. It all comes to the same conclusion: mismanagement.