MS vs Ninty's lowest selling console: Xbox vs Wii U

[Illusion]

I think that it would be a harder decision if you were pitting the GCN againt the XBox OG. That said, with Wii U against XBox OG, I say that the Wii U wins this. Despite some of the comments here, I really think that Nintendo innovated heavily on the software side with the Wii U, especially once they started getting desperate. We got Splatoon, MK8, Super Mario Maker and BotW on the Wii U: we haven't seen a lineup like that from Nintendo since at least the early N64 era when we got the lineup between Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time in two years. The Wii U deserves recognition for this, moreso than the Switch which just got re-releases of these games.

That said, it's hard to really compare a Ninty console against an MS one. Halo was an amazing game and you could argue that it beats everything on the Wii U minus BotW, but my experiences playing it were all on the PC, the only time I ever played Halo on XBox was at friend's houses and I felt the game controller was a poor substitute for a mouse and keyboard. Microsoft deliberately cannibalizes their IP by releasing everything on PC because, at the end of the day, a gaming PC is almost as much of a Microsoft product as an XBox is. It just makes it hard to say that a particular XBox console was amazing: it all kind of blends together in my view. The Wii U is more distinctive in my view, even if most of its lineup eventually ended up on the Switch.

Now if it was XBox OG vs. Gamecube, I would say that XBox would win this battle. In fact, I think that it was Nintendo's weakness during the GCN era that gave Microsoft the critical entry point that it needed into the market. Basically, the Goldeneye + Perfect Dark crowd that was firmly in Nintendo's camp during the N64 era migrated to XBox in the next gen leaving Nintendo only with the "kiddie" audience.