Soundwave said:
In fairness to the Wii U, it's library would've been considerably different early on if Nintendo had cherry picked Wii projects to put on it, like say if they held off on Zelda: Skyward Sword or Super Mario Galaxy 2 and quickly repurposed Xenoblade 1.2 and launched on Wii U with enhanced graphics. Switch lineup becomes considerably less impressive when you remove BoTW and Mario Kart 8 which are Wii U games.
The fact is too, it's not like Nintendo didn't have any strategy for the 3DS and Wii U launches ... what basically happened is they got burned hard by the casual audience abandoning them quicker than Nintendo ever could have imagined.
New Super Mario Bros. sold 30 million copies on the Wii. Nintendo Land was a high quality mini-game collection using big name Nintendo IP ... released in 2009 something like that would've sold 15+ million copies. Like 5/7 top selling Wii games are mini-game compilations.
There was no reason to think these games wouldn't drive Wii U sales. It was the same shit in their mind that was selling the Wii, and keep in mind these decisions had to be made in 2010 or so, at least two years in advance, in 2010 the casual market still looked OK, iPhone gaming was only just starting to take off (Angry Birds only came out in late 2009) and iPad had just come out.
Same thing with 3DS ... it's not like they planned to have a poor launch ... the plan was that Nintendogs + Cats would sell a shit-ton to casuals, the same way it had on the DS (24 million copies). They did not forsee how fickle casual gamers were and how quickly they would be abandoned by them in favor of Apple/Samsung devices. They trusted that crowd and got burned hard.
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It's funny you say that, because a lot of people were saying that those games wouldnt drive Wii U sales. I think its a failure on Nintendo's part for not being able to read the market. The very nature of those games would dictate that they were flash in the pans for a few years and people would lose interest at least enough to not buy them in the numbers they were initially doing. Hell you could just look at the software sales for those games on Wii they were dropping with every new release. Deca Sports, Carnival Games etc. sold less with every iteration
