When I look at Wii U I always get the feeling that this console came a year too late.

Nintendo should have released this exact console for Christmas 2011. It's not like they wouldn't be able to put this hardware on the market a year earlier or they didn't have cash after Wii and DS. If they had 2 years on the market, they would be able to develop enough heavy hitters (X, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc.) to convince many people to invest in the console. 3rd parties would also be interested in getting to know the hardware and giving the ports a bit more love (at least better textures) and knowing that PS4 and X-box 8 weren't right around the corner, they would be more willing to actually take a closer look at the console and do something with it.
With just a single year, Nintendo may not have enough time to achieve anything they planned. As it stands, I can't see a single Wii U game that I want to buy and I doubt it's going to change till the end of the year.
So for me this first year is a complete bust, it's nowhere near as good as Vita's first year, which gave us a couple of must-have games.

Nintendo screwed themselves by making hardware unorthodox to devs. The people will flock to the third party titles and they just wont have the top ones unless they are exclusive. They are having a hard time outshining even Microsoft and Sonys top title launches even with their new console, so how are they going to gain popularity with a core Nintendo console that hasn't shown off casual games?

Not only Mario, but the launch date as well. Moving the launch from Spring 2013 to Winter 2012 to squeeze out holiday sales. It is quite obvious from the poor launch firmware(+massive required launch update), poor network launch readiness, and poor first (and third) party game support, that the Wii U was launched early as a late management decision. Look at the game lineup and virtually everything is a rushed port, while Nintendo's offering is basically HD Mario DS and an offline minigame collection. All the big hitters don't have clear release dates and E3 is the big reveal for their main lineup. Spring 2013 just makes a whole lot more sense.

It hindsight yeah a fall 2011 launch would've been a better idea, but they were too busy trying to resucitate the drowning 3DS ... that's also put them behind the 8 ball, Iwata has handled both transitions horribly and put Nintendo in a bad spot.

With the Wii U now, probably they are going to have to regroup after the summer to release bigger titles.

Except they have been working on the Wii U since 2010. There is a reason why 2011 didn't have many notable releases besides Skyward Sword (which was probably delayed because of this game drought.) Releasing the Wii U earlier would mean taking an even lesser advantage of the Wii's high sales than what Nintendo ended up doing.

For that reason, I think the current situation is better than all alternatives.

It's weird, multiple sites I'm checking says 3m sold and the only one that says "shipped" is the one here on vgchartz.  Not only that, but you're OBVIOUSLY wrong about the under 2 million sold when New Super Mario Bros U sold more than 2m units.  Its attach rate would be over 100% then, that or you're implying the same person bought multiple copies.  

edit: you're actually 100% wrong because "Nintendo also released sales of its video games. The company sold 3.06 million Wii U's," from the vgchartz article.  It ALSO says 3m sold.

edit 2: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/01/30/nintendo-lower-nintendo-3ds-and-wii-u-sales-forecast/ 

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/01/30/nintendo-lowers-annual-revenue-forecast-by-17-as-wii-u-sales-drag/

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250708/nintendo-shipped-3m-wii-us-during-the-holiday/

You're wrong.  

Unless we know a few details about nextbox and ps4, it's really hard to answer your question. What will their launch prices be? How much better will the software look (graphically)? Will they have any unique features / "gimmicks"? (i personally don't consider a revised version of ps move or kinect to be new, if that's what sony / micro have in mind). If we could answer even a coupe of these questions, then we can start to judge how good or bad nintendo has really done.

Nintendo is just that friend of yours who will always be late, no matter how far in advance you tell them to get ready. They will always be scrambling at the last minute and have some excuse as to why they're running behind. And then you get mad at them and they swear next time they'll be ready on time, and it never happens.

The Wii U/Cafe was announced/leaked *2 YEARS* ago almost now (March 2011 is when the first dev kits went out and details started to leak) and they still couldn't put together a good launch window, lol.

No.. this will only be true of MS/SONY can have a must-have-"NEXTGEN" games on release day.. other than that wiiU has a year head start in development of wiiU games.. yet to be announced.

Soundwave said:



MDMAlliance said:




BaldrSkies said:
I think the Wii U proved more than anything else that Mario alone is not enough to move consoles, and that Nintendo management really has no idea what they are doing anymore.




I wouldn't really say that.  3,000,000 units sold in the time the Wii U has been out isn't that bad, it's just nowhere near what they expected (or what others expected).  It is also CURRENTLY not having much going for it as no games are being released (at least, no big ones).





It's actually under 2 million sold. 3 million would be what they shipped, which is probably going to be sitting on store shelves for a while.

According to this site, Wii u has sold 2.58m.