I'm sure Nintendo would have loved to repeat the Wii's success. It's part of the reason the Wii U is compromised the way it is, because they didn't want to move too far away from the success of the Wii. 

This is not an insight problem. 

It's a reality problem -- you can't expect your R&D to come up with an idea like the Wiimote every 5 years. It's impossible. It's like winning big in Vegas ... can you do it? Sure. Is that a sound financial strategy for paying your bills every month? Hell no. 

Their R&D simply could not come up with something as compelling as the Wiimote this time around, and honestly the whole "OMG! I have to buy that console because it has a new controller" thing itself may becoming passe as Kinect is not helping the XBox One at all either. 

Nintendo hit at the exact right time with the Wiimote with the exact right idea, but it's not a repeatable formula because once the moment is over, tons of variables change and intial success of such an idea is largely contingent on being new and different. Simply recycling the Wiimote wouldn't have worked because it's old hat now, that doesn't replicate the feeling people had playing the Wii for the first time in 2006/2007. 

It was none of those things; not a fluke, not luck, not a miracle. It was a deliberate, premeditated, and thought out smash hit.

The Wii U's struggles are due to the way it itself was handled; confusing name, too expensive, delayed software, but most importantly, a failure to account for the current market.

But the root success of the Wii Remote was reading the market, detecting an opportunity, and seizing it. With Wii U they showed no such understanding of the market; they just assumed it hadn't changed since 2006, while with the Wii they recognized that it had changed.

There's always a degree of serendipity when anything is that successful. 

Michael Jackson's Thriller is a miracle. So is James Cameron's Titanic. So is TV's Seinfeld. 

Of course these things were deliberate in their design, but to the degree that they are embraced by the public requires a certain amount of timing and (sure) luck. 

Because otherwise you should be able to make a hit product everytime just by execution and that's not always the way things work.

Michael Jackson tried his damndest to top Thriller multiple times but never could do it, because it's not that f*cking easy, lol. I think that's one thing Nintendo fans don't get, you can't just pull a Wiimote type idea out of your ass every 5 years, that's not how basic creativity works. That's an idea that comes around maybe once every 20 years. 

Not even Apple is capable of doing that ... they had an incredible streak with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, but since then haven't been able to come up with a new idea as strong as that ... because it's *difficult* to do (you think they haven't invested billions in trying to find the next big thing?).

Yet DS sales boosted Wii sales? Your logic is flawed.

Indeed, which lead us to the conclusion they don't know how the video game market works. Of course I'm not talking about handheld, they are unbeatable there. You may be right, wii could have been a premeditaded move of Nintendo, but doesn't change the fact that's not going to happen again.

Yeah, phenomenons happen largely on their own, the idea that you can "will" a phenonmenon into existence through sheer hard work and execution is kind of silly. 

It's like telling JK Rowling to just write harder and eventually she'll come up with something even more popular than Harry Potter. Uh no. It's virtually impossible to top Harry Potter, that was a one time thing that probably won't happen again for a long time and if it does it won't be JK Rowling that comes up with the idea, because the odds of one person "winning the lottery" twice like that are extremely low. 

That's not to say she didn't work hard on Harry Potter or it was all luck and all her work on it should be invalidated ... no, it's just stating the that *repeating* something like that even with the same (or even more effort) is extremely unlikely. 

It wasn't a foregone conclusion that the Wii U would flop. It could have been a success if they'd not made so many elementary mistakes.

It's like that scene in Jurassic Park 2:

"Don't worry Ian, I'm not making the same mistakes again!"
"No, no, you're making all new ones."

DS and Wii were different enough not to cannibalize each other.

A "Wii" console without a revolutionary *new* controller method that could spread word of mouth by people just using it for 2 minutes or so was by definition never going to achieve the same success as the Wii. 

The fact that the best idea they could come up with was an uninspired kids-tablet looking thing just made the issue 10x worse though. 

Honestly in hindsight they shouldn't have tried to iterate on the Wii period unless they had an incredible controller idea to sell the package with, because without that it's virtually the anti-thesis of the Wii formula. 

They should have just made a regular console with a new brand and taken as much advantage of a one year head start as possible. 

But you just knew Nintendo couldn't resist trying the "lets just sell the entire console based on the controller again" option and had to learn the hard way (as usual).