Alternate History: Wii U as a standard 8th gen console

[Bofferbrauer2]

The problem with the premise is that it glosses over why the Wii U actually failed so hard, the internal hardware was pretty much the least of it's problems.

1. Name and design way too similar to the Wii, making people think it was just a tablet controller for the latter console
2. Completely botched reveal and marketing. Not only did they go über-casual with the marketing ticking off gamers, there again they didn't mention that it was a new console - or a console at all. This all just reinforced the problem on number 1.
3. The fact that Nintendo let the third party go first and not have a big release title for the console backfired (remember the "unprecedented partnership" with EA?), as it resulted with Nintendo lacking any compelling exclusive at launch. No, ZombiU doesn't count, even at it's best it would only have a reach of 1-2M, while a big launch exclusive should have 10 times that reach. The publishers also shot themselves in the foot by mostly releasing late ports at full price when they were already cheaper on competing consoles instead of new titles, removing any reason to buy the console for their games.
4. The tablet controller. Few publishers, and even Nintendo themselves, really knew what to do with it. And with it's life being so cut short, there hasn't been much experimentation with it either, so who knows what they would have come up with had the console been a success.
5. Only now do we get to the low-power hardware, especially the CPU. It was made in a way so that it would be backwards-compatible with the Wii, but in practice that meant having a 14-year old CPU (the CPU in GameCube, Wii and Wii U is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 from 1997) overclocked and tripled. Even with the extra cores and clock speed over the Wii, that CPU was extremely slow due to it's old architecture - too slow for many contemporary games to run smoothly without tinkering. Publishers were used to the reverse problem, where they had a tiny GPU that needed support from the CPU to run smoothly, so direct ports would run pretty badly on the Wii U. Not that the GPU of the Wii U was much more powerful than the one in the 360, they were actually more or less on par, it's big advantage here was the much larger VRAM of 2GB (which Nintendo then botched with a slow DDR3 interface), which allowed for more detailed textures and less loading from the slow RAM, but that's about it.

Now, had numbers 1-3 worked out, number 4 or 5 wouldn't have been a problem. Low-powered hardware in itself ain't a problem, just look at both it's predecessor or it's successor. Or at the original Gameboy beating the Game Gear, PC Engine GT and Lynx combined handily. Or the DS curbstomping the PSP. Or the PS2 trashing the much more powerful Xbox and Gamecube. It's the other factors around the console which had a much bigger impact on why the Wii U failed than the hardware itself, though the latter certainly wasn't helping matters either.