Too much focus and fixation on children under 10 years old.

Nintendo honestly hasn't been able to sell consoles very well for like 15 years now aside from the motion gaming craze which kinda fizzled out after about 4 years. So 11/15 years they've struggled to sell home consoles.

Their consoles are just seen as too much of a "for kids" product, and even kids don't want that (they want the games their older brother/cousin/kid down the street is playing). The "wholesome fun for the whole family!" thing from the 1980s that Nintendo keeps sticking to just doesn't resonate today and really hasn't for a while. 

The industry in general has moved more towards violent/dark Western software too ... look at any monthly NPD ... 90% of the top 10 is pretty much exclusively that type of game or a sports game every single month.

Maybe it has to do of how it was projected towards it's audience. Maybe they weren't looking for touch screens, maybe they didn't focus on the casuals enough, maybe the console specs made some gamers see that the console was going to be stuck in last-gen. Or maybe not even Nintendo believes in the console, which is not the same that they don't believe in their software. For whom it was geared towards?

Lifetime, I do believe it will get past 20 million units sold.

Courtesy of NeoGaf ... Wii U remains waaaaaaaaaay behind the GameCube's LTD when looking at US numbers 

The gap is growing bigger every month too, it's not shrinking. Had the Dreamcast not been discontinued basically, I think it's quite possible the Dreamcast even would've outsold the Wii U in the US. 

Wii U will outsell DreamCast next NPD lol, unrless Nintendo will discontinued Wii U tomorrow of course...

Any way, the US was the bigger GC territory. i think that in the US Wii U will not even close with GC, indeed, my prediction is Wii U at 8,000,000, 33% under GC.

But this is the US. Globally, the situation is difference... GC have sold more than N64 in france. And i believe that Wii U will outsell GC in this countries.

This is only one example, but generally, the WW situation is not like in the US...

Simply put: It's just not widely appealing and it clearly shows.

Yet there are few games that sell as much as Mario lol.

Yooka-Laylee kickstarter should also tell you otherwise.

Just because a small niche group of fans on the internet decide to fund something like Yooka-Laylee doesn't mean games like that drive the modern market. 

Look at Wonderful 101 on the Wii U. 

Or any Top 10 NPD software sales chart for the last 4+ years. The industry is driven by violent/dark action games and sports titles and not a hell of a lot in between. Mario, Minecraft, and LEGO have their place, almost nothing else does though, even stuff like LittleBigPlanet is having problems selling. 

What on earth does TW101 have to do with a 3D platformer? That game got zero marketting on a failing console. Platinum's violent/dark action games also flopped.

The industry is driven by those games because the industry doesn't make anything else. They should make more variety.

Not a chance for it to pass 12M.