A lot of times I hear people say that the main weakness Nintendo needs to address with their console is the lack of 3rd party support. Hypethetically speaking, if the Wii U did have all the major 3rd party games would it manage to compete with the other two and taken away a chunk of their crowd? This despite the fact that the Wii U is clearly weaker hardware wise.

If Wii U still wouldn't have sold well without 3rd party support, is the issue that they make weak hardware? But then the GC and N64 had powerful hardware.

You mean it's hardware would still be basically a generation behind the other two? In that case no, third party support would not have helped, why should I pay $60 to play an inferior version of a game compared to the PS4/XB1.

No, remember '' I buy Nintendo console for Nintendo games'' wii U owners at the start of the gen. The games would just have sell way less than on the PS4/X1, and why the hell would people buy a wii U when you can play a better version of the big games on PS4/X1

That would've left the terrible marketing, horrible launch, stupid gimmick, dumb as fuck name, and underpowered hardware to take care of it flopping, not as hard as the current flop, but it would've flopped regardless.

Probably not. But it may have fared slightly better if it got full 3rd party support

Wouldn't have changed anything.

Maybe it wouldn't have reached PS4 level sales, but it may have reached GCube or N64 sales, which are still way better sales than the WiiU, both in hardware and software (specially with the attach rate Nintendo games have).

Competed with the PS4? No!

Sold Better? Most definitely.

No, but it could at least have sold as good or better than the Gamecube, and it would instill more confidence in people that their next platform will have 3rd party support, and thus also increase NX sales.

with full 3rd party I think you would have been looking at around 20-25m lifetime( so around gamecube/orignal Xbox) rather than around 15m or whatever the Wii U ends up at.