The Gamecube was my favourite console of all time. I hope the Wii U gets games as good as the Cube. The Wii was a bitter disappointment for me. All my favourite franchises dumbed down, had waggle or pointer controls added (I didn't like them).

The 360 is where I did most of my console gaming from 2008-2012 and it felt more like a successor to the Cube than the Wii did. The only thing I hated was that Microsoft were stinging me at every turn. I like the Wii U a lot. It's what I wanted the Wii to be only 7 years too late. If it was another casual system I would have given up on Nintendo completely by now. Just my two cents....

The only slight flaw with Yamauchi's point in retrospect in that a lot of that audience is very fickle. At the time he was completely right to say it and Nintendo certainly reaped the benefits from this strategy. However, the question is what's left for them to innovate on?

VR tech isn't ready, I'd say people are largely over motion controls as a USP (in that I'd argue that once the blue ocean audience have had that experience with Wii, they won't pay for it again but prettier) so WiiU was always likely to be stuck between a rock and a hard place tech-wise. Of course there is the recent tablet trend which they tried to ride, but the fact is people had been playing with touch for nearly a decade on DS and that many people already owned some sort of touch phone or tablet which could do that so there was no novelty attached to it.

It goes back to Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy when designing the Game Boy - using familiar tech in new ways. The problem is what happens when they miss the boat on that tech so it becomes more mundane, which is what happened with WiiU and now they're forced to wait for the next one which may come who knows when?

You can argue that Sony and MS are far more conservative and they probably are, but that's because their 'hardcore' audience is much more reliable. Nintendo have become forced into an all or nothing strategy, when it works they absolutely dominate, when it doesn't they end up with a WiiU or GCN on their hands

I didn't read the OP but I don't agree with it. I'll come up with my reasons why when I get back.

That's a bit hard to say that about the DS

The Wii U's biggest flaw seems to be that Nintendo failed to take into account the direction the global market has been going toward.

The Wii U isn't a bad device and works well for the Japanese industry where many are suffering with the rise of high cost of HD development and hundred person teams for one game to try to woo the larger Western markets. But it is obvious that they didn't really consult any western developers or take their suggestions seriously in terms of what needed to be done given how outside of the indie scene so few are willing to come to its defense or even bother trying to push the device.

The Wii U is probably the laziest piece of hardware Nintendo put out primarily because it has potential to be better but because of issues like the implementation of online features, the lack of unique Gamepad centric experiences, games and just a overall lack of polish the device is suffering. Had it been released along side hardware of equal power this might not have been as big of a problem but it was dropped early before stronger competitors like Xbox One and PS4, it comes off like a Dreamcast nice but ultimately to be ignored because publishers and consumers have no real motivation to support it.

It is seemingly having decent sales in Japan despite no real major Japanese developer support outside of Nintendo itself but Nintendo has ways to go to improve its situation outside of their home land and have wasted over a year doing nothing to build the Wii U brand. The brand might still be salvageable but the more they wait to do legit work at creating a unique brand for the device instead of trying to make it a next generation Wii successor for families the window gets smaller.

If games like Smash Bros 4 and Bayoneeta 2 don't big market pushes, then the system is finished.