Cuz' it needed to fail. Nintendo needed a wake up call, and still need about another 20 of 'em.

Higher initial price than Wii, Third party support was lackluster even at the beginning it was mostly just last-gen ports. No game that sold the console anywhere close to Wii Sports. The tablet controller while a great feature didn't market well and didn't seem as "innovative" or at least wasn't appealing to the audience as the wii's motion controls were back in 2006. The really casual audience that bought a wii and only use it at parties probably see no reason to upgrade.

All in all the WiiU is a fantastic system with great first party support and the gamepad is actually fantastic, problem is neither customer nor publisher seem to care.

I wonder if Nintendo will have incentive to stay in the console business if the next home console sells worse...if amibo takes off and handheld continues to profit, then the meager profit from the wii u may give Nintendo less reason to stay in the home console business

Well, said everything I was going to, so...god job cream147

Nintendo had it all set but got overconfident!
The situation in 2011.

• They had an "unprecedented" relationship with EA.
• They had a possible exclusive deal on Skylanders (possible use for the NFC reader).
• They had a cheap alternative to the most popular gadget in 2011 - the iPad.
• Sony (and probably MS too) had bled money for a couple of years and wanted the generation to last for a couple more years.
• They had "won" the 7th generation. (2011 - Wii U = ~90 million, X360 = ~50 million, PS3 = ~50 million)
• They still had the casual audience: selling more than 5 million ( in 2011 ) of games like Wii Fit Plus, Wii Sports Resort, Just Dance, MK7 & NSMB.
• They were following the advice of Michael Pachter - making a Wii HD.

• They were no more friends with EA.
• Skylanders was a hit on their own.
• iPad was no more as "hot" as it was a year prior.
• Sony and MS were making a comback late in the generation.
• The casual audience: was gone to mobile.
• They were following the advice of Michael Pachter - making a Wii HD.

I wrote a blog post about the Wii U shortly after it was revealed 4 years ago. My conclusion then was that it would "fail" because of 5 reasons:

1) Bad Pricing
2) Bad Marketing
3) Unintuitive Design
4) A Generation Behind Competition
5) A Really Bad Controller

They ended up improving the design of their controller a bit over the original prototype (Seriously, circle-pads?), and the PS4 and XB1 ended up releasing earlier than I expected. Besides that...

I think that you're on to something here.

With the exception of the Wii, every subsequent Nintendo console has sold progressively worse.  Now obviously the Wii U is going to sell more than 9.5 million units before the end of its lifetime, but barring a major turnaround we can it expect it to sell about 15 million units.  This would be a pretty consistent trend for the drop-off that we saw from the Gamecube prior.

I think that you are right, the console market has changed while Nintendo has not.  In the early 90's video game consoles were primarily a "kid" focused industry.  Yes there were lots of mature games even on the SNES, but the key demographic was kids (think about Sega's marketing strategy with "Blast Processing" as though they were fuelling the playground arguments about which console was better).  That started to change with the Playstation and changed even more when Microsoft entered the console market.  Consoles started to become more like computers with extremely high end graphics chips and the consoles themselves started to become more like home entertainment centres.  The key here is that these consoles are not marketed towards children primarily.  Nintendo and Sega's 90's kids had grown up and Microsoft and Sony were perfectly positioned to deliver the kind of gaming experience that they now wanted.

In short, I don't think the Wii U would have done much better even if it was more powerful, had a better name, or was more effectively marketed.  Even if there was a $100 price drop I don't believe it would be selling that much better than it is right now.  It's just a console that's in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

The good news for Nintendo is that there still is a kid market out there: it's called mobile gaming.  Furthermore, it sounds like the mobile gaming market is experiencing similar struggles to that of the console market back in the early 80's.  Currently, there are a lot of low-quality games on mobile devices that are starting to bloat out the higher quality gaming experiences.  Good mobile developers cannot easily rise above the pack to get their games noticed above all of the bad ones.  Nintendo is in a perfect position to revolutionize the mobile gaming market the way they did with consoles in the 80's.  That is, to create an exclusive environment on smartphones where people can go to play extremely high quality games (think about the old "Seal of Quality" that Nintendo used to have).  Furthermore, Nintendo's kid friendly graphics will be a perfect fit on mobile devices where First Person Shooters will likely never be a successful game genre.

In summary, I think the future is very bright for Nintendo.  I just hope that they don't bother with another dedicated home console.  It wasn't the marketing or the price that killed the Wii U.

Read the other comments. Its all over the place.

No, it didn't. Image always have been a factor to gaming. It's just that Ps4 being the most powerful console of the generation make it the most cool console to purchase.

That is why X1 passed the NWU. because you look cool playing mature and realistic looking games

The OG xbox was released later when ps2 already established a big advantage in the market and it was the first console from microsoft. Many people didn't know about it that's why it didn't managed to make a big advantage over GC

so the only mistake they made is to follow a advice of michael pachter. Thats always the worst decision you could made..:D