Mario Kart 8 hasn't changed the Wii U's fortunes. Its the U's biggest release and still the console has already dropped below 100k sales.

Wii U is a niche console like the Vita is a niche handheld.

So you're saying over time good quality things sell well. hmm...I have to disagree. The Wii U is a great console and not lame, but it has very little chance of selling well. PS4 and X1 will outsell it by a wide margin.

That's after the Wii U got the biggest excusive game it will ever get. That makes it all the more disappointing as the Vita hasn't got any of Sony's major IP's other than Uncharted which wasn't as well-recieved as the console games.

Meanwhile the Wii U has already got many of Nintendo's biggest IP's and its biggest one just recently and still has dropped below 100k.

Of course not to mention the home console market is a lot more mainstream than handheld market.

That is what makes Wii U sales look even worse. In spite of all these exclusives its not doing too well.

Vita's case is more understandable, that's all I'm saying.

NSMBU should have gotten the AAAAAAAAAAAA treatment from Nintendo considering how much NSMBW boosted the then-dying Wii.

Still, if you look at NSMBU's attach rate, you can see it's still the strongest killer app. But they severely gimped it with their lazy effort on the game.

Has it though? Mariokart and NSMB I suppose but where is smash, Zelda, Paper Mario, Metroid, and a real 3d mario? The wii had all of these by this point minus NSMB. Sure, a healthy part of the wii's success can explained by the hype people had for motion controls (a hype not held for the new controller) but it would be a mistake to forget that the early wii library absolutely trounces the wiiu's.

NSMBU was the only thing keeping Wii U alive or i guess somewhat relevant for a long time. I don't want to imagine how bad things would have been if the console launched with just Nintendoland and other 3rd party ports.

Despite Nintendo not giving a crap about 2D Mario compared to what they do for 3D iterations. These games are still more cherished by mass market. The forums are totally different story though.

Edit: A lesson Nintendo could learn is to put their A team on the next iteration of 2D Mario. Let's wait and see but i doubt it. The series will survive because the underlying fundamentals are still very strong. 

These forums don't matter in the real world it's just a place you can go to bash nintendo no matter what they do

Sure, but beside showing that MK8 will probably do better than NSMBU it doesn't tell us much, like what it's legs are and what the long term impact on WiiU sales looks like.  We can see that a lot of existing WiiU owners bought it.

For now the data points are also fishy;  VGC's estimate for the MK8 boost was seriously discredited by NPD's result. 

Heh that happens. :P

It would be interesting to see your take on Zelda franchise next, mostly the home console ones. Although, i kind of understand that they do it to bring the core, dedicated gamers in with this franchise. It is still puzzling to me as to why they they allocate the biggest budget to a game that is very stagnant in sales numbers. Not the best of analogy but it would be like Rockstar allocating $200 million plus for sequel to Bully, than reserving the money for next GTA game. I understand it is almost impossible to do this since we don't know the individual budgets of the games. So, calculating return on investment would be hard.