Opinion: Wii U’s Failure Had Little To Do With The Gamepad.

[Jumpin]

I strongly agree it was a major reason for the failure simply based on the negative reaction around the Gamepad through the generation. The word "half-baked" was used a lot to describe the Gamepad and Wii U experience. It was definitely the source of a lot of negativity around the Wii U.

• Off-TV gameplay lacked basic desired functionality, this was a big complaint (even addressed in the Switch marketing with it's alternative "handheld mode" (toilet guy). Basically, if you left your living room, the Wii U Gamepad ceased to function.
• It had a terrible battery life compared to other home console controllers.
• It was very clunky for a lot of the games that Wii Remotes worked so well for. You basically had to acquire them separately if you didn't have them.
• Unlike the Switch 2's backward compatibility being fully functional, the Wii U gamepad was unusable on your Wii library. You needed to keep old controllers around, this did NOT feel like a continuation of the Wii the way the Switch 2's full backwards compatibility did.
• The whole idea of dividing your attention between two screens out of your range of site made for intrusive experiences throughout games that didn't require them but added them anyway.
• The whole idea of "asymmetric gameplay" (unlike the Wii) actually did feel like a gimmick to cover up the fact that only one gamepad could be used.
• The Wii U felt like a one player home console because of the Gamepad.
• It was bulky, didn't look very fun to use, people at the demo kiosks often looked like they were handling something weird when they picked it up, it was a full 180 from the Wii Remotes.
• It was uncomfortable to play the Wii U gamepad at the demo Kiosks. It wasn't a good experience

But personally, I think there are other big reasons for the Wii U's failure: the Kiosk experience being a big one (which I touched on above). While these had worked very well in the past to demonstrate new consoles and features all the way back to at least the later years of the SNES, the Wii U did the opposite... and not in the Saturn way, where people liked the kiosks, but then saw the price compared to the Playstation doing the exact same thing, and bought that instead. Simply, the Kiosk for the Wii U was a bad experience, it probably advertised people to not get the console.

Apart from the Gamepad just feeling clunky at the Kiosks, the load times were crazy... like 2-3 minutes to get into a game. And the landing times in the early days of the Wii U weren't much better, and even at the end of the cycle, it was still quite long compared to the Wii and the Switch, where you can just turn it on and play.

And the third part was that it wasn't so much that the games were bad, but that they were bad for that console. Most people don't like Mario Kart as a one player game; most people don't want to sit through all the Wii U OS loading times and Wii Mode loading time to play Virtual console games they could have done instantly on the Wii or previous consoles; and most people prefer it when their home console's controller lasts more than 90 minutes. This was demonstrated when Mario Kart 8 became a major sales driver for Switch alongside Breath of the Wild (also on Wii U, also a failure there), people wanted Mario Kart on that console, not so much Wii U.

As a very hardcore Nintendo fan, it was really hard to see them fumble this one so badly, because Iwata outside of that had done a great job; even cleaning up the disastrous (and unpredictable) 3DS launch, which suffered a huge amount of "3D will destroy your vision and give you migraines" hysteria at launch... Although, it was destined to lose a lot of users from the DS because of the rise of smart tablets and mobiles. Some lost faith in Iwata over this, but the extent of his health problems weren't known at this time, which may have contributed.

If it's not clear. From everything I saw and experienced, the Wii U Gamepad was certainly a major cause. And I find myself not being able to look back at it with the rose-coloured spectacles a lot of the fandom has decided to do (Gamecube all over again).