Remember when the Wii U was aiming for the "core gamer"?

[Wman1996]

killeryoshis said:

I remember after E3 2012 when many people on this forum thought the Wii U would do amazing because of its appeal to Hardcore and Casual. Then the sale numbers came out, and we found out it appealed to no one but hardcore Nintendo fans. (Actually, it didn't even do that right. I didn't get one until 2015.)

There are many theories on why it failed. But I can say the Switch succeeded because Nintendo made a system to appeal to all their young, old, and new fans. They also cheated by combining two systems into one.

I wasn't on this forum yet, but from what I remember I figured the Wii U would do somewhere in the ballpark of N64 to SNES. If it cracked 50 million, probably not much more than that. 

By late Q1 2013 into Q2 2013, a lot of the writing was on the wall. Nintendo games already had large droughts in 2013, and third-party support was already drying up (which would become more severe from 2014 onward).

Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U in 2014 were the last chance to turn Wii U around, and they didn't. 

If Nintendo made one platform at the time (but it wasn't a hybrid), 3DS probably would have sold a little more if it was on its own and Wii U would have sold a lot more.