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Miyamotoo on 10 June 2016
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RolStoppable said:
Nuvendil said:

That's somewhat true but the reality is that they had numerous opportunities to improve the Wii U's fortunes after the 3DS was all set. 2014 was the biggest one.  Nintendo had everything that could go right go right for them:  the Big 3 of the 3rd parties all disappointed in their launch state (Titanfall, Watch Dogs, and Destiny) thus derailing a lot of hype trains, Mario Kart 8 was a great success and caused sales to surge and keep them ahead of Xbone for the entire summer, Halo 5 and Uncharted 4 both turned out to miss 2014 and land in later dates, and they had two Game of the Year contenders as exclusives in the last third of the year.  There was no excuse - NO excuse - for Nintendo to not maintain the number 2 spot in the console race and have a hugely successful holiday.  But they then went and did almost everything possible to completely screw it up.  Hyrule Warriors and Bayonetta 2 got only limited marketing and no bundles of any kind, limited or otherwise.  Smash didn't get a bundle, limited or otherwise.  Mario Kart 8 didn't even get a wide spread bundle for the holidays.  Their only widespread bundle was the Super Mario 3D World bundle - a game that was a year old, with all hype long dead.  The Wii U didn't get a price cut, didn't get a temporary price reduction, there weren't even any exceptional black friday deals.  And to top it all off, no system focused ads to play up the backlog.  Nintendo had a chance in 2014 to change the Wii U's course and right the ship and they completely and utterly failed.  

There was no real chance to change the Wii U's course. When the 3DS did badly early on, its weekly sales were higher than the Wii U's during its good times, and that makes a significant difference when it comes to price cuts. When the price is cut, a company has to expect that the loss it takes in the short term will pay off eventually. The 3DS didn't make much money in its lifetime despite its hardware and software sales, so the result for a hypothetical Wii U price cut may very well have been negative. Consider the bad outlook for software releases for the Wii U in 2014, there wasn't any reason to believe that a lot of software would be sold to make up for the losses that would come with a hypothetical price cut.

Maintaining the number 2 spot in the console race was an impossibility because Microsoft could also slash the price of their hardware and, unlike Nintendo, they wouldn't have to go through prolonged software droughts. With the Wii U, Nintendo's choice came down to acting aggressive, selling more hardware and taking bigger losses on the whole endeavor versus acceptance of the failure and damage control.

You can argue that Nintendo should have made more and better bundles for the Wii U, but ultimately the Wii U could never be corrected like the 3DS. It also helped the 3DS that its only competitor was the pathetic Vita. Meanwhile, the Wii U's competition was and is a lot more fierce. Price cuts would have probably followed the path of the GameCube. It didn't pay off back then and it's very likely that Nintendo remembered that when they considered the options for the Wii U.

Totally agree, Wii U could have some better sales but after 1st year when Wii U was already dead nothing could save it.