Without disagreeing with anything TheLastStarfighter said, Rol is essentially correct.

Which is also the flaw with the OP.  Wii was an abhorration to the decline in Nintendo's home console sales, for this exact reason.   Why Nintendo reverted to it's earlier 'Red Ocean' flawed strategy is beyond me.   I don't see any reason why we couldn't have had a true Wii 2 with similar success to Wii.

Nintendo doesn't have a new gimmick like motion gaming to sell the Wii U. Aside from name, there's pretty nothing that ties the Wii and Wii U together, two successive consoles could not be any more different sales wise.

That said the Wii didn't get respect from third parties even with its sales, so what does it really matter. Nintendo is going to make their same core IP on the Wii U, we just won't get a flood of fitness/party/crapware to the same extent. I don't mind.

I'd rather have a 20-30 million selling Wii U where there exists at least an OK sized group of people who might purchase games like Wonderful 101, then 100 million where like 70% of the userbase only bought the console primarily because of Wii Sports and similar types of casual software and are only willing to maybe try Mario games.

I'm glad those people are gone to smartphones and tablets. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I'll just say it -- f**k "blue ocean" if the audience is that fickle that they go running to $1 games and only play maybe an average of 10-15 minutes a day at best.

Ps4 development started in 2008 and vita before that. We will never know the losses of any item.

Because Nintendo despite all the casual bruhaha, is actually a core game maker. Always has been, always will be. They just use more accessible "colorful/mascot characters".

Nintendo working on Brain Training and Wii Fit was always like having a great movie director like Martin Scorcese or Steven Speilberg do nothing but Youtube short films or TV commercials or something. I mean sure, they're more than able to do that, and probably can do it well, but their talent is simply far better suited to actual feature length films. Super Mario Galaxy is what Nintendo is about at their core, not Wii Sports.

I don't think Wii Sports even registers as one of the 50 best games Nintendo's made.

If that Wii casual crowd can't accept anything from Nintendo other than the occassional 2D Mario and Mario Kart ... (and it seems like they've had their fill of 2D Mario for the next few years) then honestly, screw 'em.

Two reasons why Nintendo is back in the red:

1. Disruptive ideas don't come around every day. They're rare, hard to execute, and even harder to spot in the first place. Chasing after them too aggressively might have made Wii U the next Virtual Boy instead of the next Gamecube.

2. The chink in the Wii's armor was third party support, and Nintendo's hardware and software rivals were willing to burn enough cash to exploit it. Nintendo thought it could create a console that was innovative enough to attract new gamers and conventional enough to retain third party support. Have its cake and eat it, too.

Unfortunately, Nintendo didn't realize that most of it's third party support problems had nothing at all to do with unconventional design, and by compromising on innovation, they've merely undermined their efforts to attract new gamers.

We have to remember that Nintendo made a lot of the decisions for the Wii U design probably back in 2010, when the iOS market was really just taking off and the iPad was just launching.

I don't think they anticipated getting left at the altar alone by the casual crowd, they designed the console thinking a good chunk of the casuals were loyal to them and would come back for more.

If Nintendo knew today that they'd be screwed over by that audience, they likely would've made different design choices with the Wii U.

You think that's bad? In a couple of years the most common opinion will be that the Wii was a failure.

I'd relate it more to Martin Scorcese marking a Transformers movie.  Sure it's cinematic crap but it sure is popular and pays the bills.   I have a lot of respect for actors like Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt that alternate between blockbuster pop-corn flicks and low/no pay art films. 

Nintendo should - in my opinion - remain that way, because some of their ips have huge mass market appeal (Mario Kart, 2D Mario, Wii___, Animal Crossing, etc) some are mid-range appeal (Zelda, 3D Mario, Donkey Kong Country, Smash Bros) and some really are niche (Fire Emblem, Metroid, Pikmin).

Their hardware should never limit their software's potential audience the way that WiiU's gamepad (apparently) does.

Still considering wii was a fail overall.

Yes, loads of sales, but recent molls indicated most Wiis were not played during the last 3 years.

If your Nintendo console is taking dust 2 years before next gen, why woul you buy another one ?

Because Nintendo is promising that the Wii U Gamepad offers several exciting new possible ways to play videogames, such as