I figured it wouldn't come close to matching the wii, but I didn't expect it to be the dumpster fire that it is right now.

The Wii U has been genuinely more successful than I expected it to be. That was where my expectations were.

I expected AAA offerings, mainline Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc... All we got were spinoffs and ports. Only one AAA caliber game came out the whole gen, MK8.

Bayonetta 2, Xenoblade X and Smash Bros are also AAA, the mainline Zelda is coming sooner or later and Tropial Freeze is the best donkey kong ever done.

I thought it would sell 40m through some degree of loyalty to the Wii brand and the expectation of superior versions games like tomb raider, GTA etc

I didn't realise its CPU was worse then PS3/360

Expected less than the wii.

Gamepads are nerdy and dull compaired to how kickass nunchucks sound/are.
Also with a gamepad your not exactly active when you play... .which was much of what made the wii a hit.

To be honest I expect better of the Wii U.
But yeah I wasnt expecting them to repeat the success of the Wii.

People downplay how much a controller and how it interacts with a console matters.
If the NX has a gamepad and they still dont have good funktions figoured out for it gameplay wise.... *face palm*

We ll see a repeat of the Wii U.

I really hope nintendo does a real 3D mario... like Mario 64 part 2, another 3D/2D sidescrolling mario just wont do, esp after how many the Wii U gave us.

a 2D sidescroller mario for the NX instead of a 3D will basically make up my mind about its future.

I expected total dominance despite not really having a launch game I wanted. I thought it had some secret power that would be revealed later. I thought Nintendo games in HD would be too much to resist.

I accept reality now but damn, I had high hopes. Never thought it would do so poorly.

I figured it would be down from Wii by a substantial amount, but not nearly as terrible as it did.

I assumed a lot of the casual audience would leave like they did, but I thought the Wii would at least have created a new batch of Nintendo fans or had won back old fans that left considering it's large install-base. I didn't expect Nintendo to drop the ball hard on WiiU's marketing, the third-party mass-exodus after first pledging support, or the lack of truly great, 'classic' first party games that oozed the ambition their big games from previous generation had.

I expected SNES level sales, sometimes I would say 40m, while on good days I would say up to 64m. Later, I would say 25m, now, 18.

I figured it would have be third place, but I could never imagine it would still have so long of a wait time between big titles even into its fourth year (and looking to continue into it's fifth). It's failure is one of its own making, and can be seen by how many units it sells when big name titles come out. They should have outsourced more, bought Atlus and pushed for Capcom and Sega IPs to buy outright. They were talking about mergers and acquisitions and that never came to fruition. Sad, because the Wii U could have found moderate success.

Preach. Also Splatoon has far bigger of a budget than I would have thought.