Those were just some examples. Here's a few more

Donkey Country Returns 3D - Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze

Zelda 3D ports - Zelda HD ports

Super Mario Maker 3ds - Super Mario Maker

NES Remix Ultimate - NES Remix

Lego City Undercover 3ds - Lego City Undercover

New Super Mario Bros 2 - New Super Mario Bros U

While not all of the games I listed are not exactly the same game, they are however incredibly similar, and when taking account the 3ds's cheaper price it's easy to see why a game like Smash Bros for 3ds could really hurt Wii U's sales as a copy of Smash 3ds and the handheld itself would only cost you $140, whereas if you wanted to buy the Wii U version and the Wii U to play it on it would be $300 +

I skimmed through the replies and saw people saying that this is a good writeup. That tends to make me suspicious, so I began to read the original post in earnest. Unsurprisingly, it repeats many of the flawed views that people have accepted as the truth despite evidence to the contrary being out there.

2011

The stage for a dark age is set in advance. If you understand that, then the beginning of the dark age is E3 2010, a press conference that was actually widely agreed upon to be great. But it's at that time that the 3DS was unveiled, the console that led to Nintendo's first loss over the course of a full financial year since they had entered the video game business. People are always quick to blame everything on the Wii U because they only look at unit sales, but it's the 3DS that began to dig the hole. Nintendo fully banked on stereoscopic 3D selling the hardware, so they didn't prepare much first party software in parts because of that; their other reason to go soft with Nintendo games is that they believed that fewer Nintendo games will lead to higher sales of third party software. The fundamental flaw in this thinking is that third party software is rarely good enough to sell Nintendo hardware, therefore such a strategy hurts everyone. The correct approach is to go hard on Nintendo games, because that boosts hardware adoption rate and everyone benefits.

The complacence regarding the 3DS created a domino effect. Nintendo did not only have to take their first loss in the fiscal year ending March 2012 because of the early 3DS price cut, but they also had to pull developers from Wii U projects to finish key titles for the 3DS faster. The eventual result of that was the completely broken software pipeline for the Wii U, because Wii U games had to be delayed in the aftermath of getting the 3DS back on track.

2012

The Wii U's main problem was not the name, not the marketing, and least of all it wasn't that "people were put off by the Wii." The Wii U's problem was the exact opposite: It wasn't a proper successor to the Wii. The most obvious key factor is that Nintendo relegated Wii Remote and Nunchuk to a tertiary control option and didn't even bother to provide improved versions, but rather just said that people should buy the Wii accessories. That's the same strategy they used during the transition from GameCube to Wii when GC controllers were a tertiary control option, but consider that for Wii it was a sound strategy because the GC was a failure. It's perfectly fine to make drastic changes after a failure and pursue a different direction. However, it is completely braindead to reject your success and return to an evolution of a concept that already failed you before. The Gamepad is the evolution of the GC to GBA connectivity; if the control setup isn't obvious enough, consider that Nintendo Land incorporated gameplay of various GC to GBA connectivity titles. The Wii U's main problem was that it was a repackaged GC and the market saw through it, so the Wii U followed the GC trajectory in sales.

Your summary of Wii U games is terrible. You call Pikmin 3 long-awaited when it is an IP that has never sold much on any console; Pikmin is utterly forgettable and disposable when it comes to hardware sales. New Super Mario Bros. U keeps getting the blame for sinking the Wii U, but in reality it is the only thing that kept it from doing even worse. Consider these two important factors: For one, NSMBU had an attach rate of ~60% in the early going because it was just about the only game worth buying on Wii U, and two, every single Nintendo IP has failed to turn around the Wii U afterwards, including Mario Kart 8 which proved its real system-selling power on Switch three years after its Wii U release. What you have with Wii U is similar to a Virtual Boy situation where it doesn't matter how good the software is, because the market doesn't want the hardware. Of course the Wii U was not as bad as the Virtual Boy, but if that's the only thing Wii U can outdo, you have a real mess on your hands.

You call the Wii U's launch a success, but it absolutely wasn't. Not only did it miss its forecast, but its sell-through was terrible on top of that. That's why shipments in the following quarters were abysmal, because the system had already failed at launch.

2013-2014

Third party support for Wii U was already on its way out at E3 2012. By December 2012 there was a list floating around on the internet that showed that ~80% of announced multiplatform games were not in development for Wii U. Remember, that was still before the PS4 and Xbox One, so processing power had nothing to do with those decisions. And remember, at that time third parties couldn't have made their decisions based on sales either, because sales data had yet to come in.

The crucial point you forget to mention for this period is January 2014. Nintendo revised its shipment forecast for Wii U down by 6.2m, from 9m to 2.8m. Satoru Iwata talked about Nintendo's next generation in January 2014. While Iwata had allowed the company to go ahead with its headscratching decisions to make the 3DS and Wii U, he had come to his senses at that point. He knew that the current generation (3DS and Wii U) were all about damage control at that point, and that he had to plant the correct seeds for their successors.

Nintendo had no faith in Wii U anymore. Their forecast for Wii U for the fiscal year ending March 2015 was 3.6m, a pathetic figure. The reason why Nintendo kept releasing Wii U games for years after they had recognized that it is a failure is that Nintendo is in it for the long term. They couldn't expect people to buy another console of theirs if they stopped supporting their current one.

2015-2017

It doesn't matter if you believe NX wasn't announced because of the announcement of Nintendo making mobile games, all it means is that you are wrong. Announcing the next console generation at that point in time instantly curbstomped all speculation that Nintendo might stop making consoles.

The main purpose of Nintendo's mobile games is to raise IP awareness and get people to buy Nintendo consoles and games. That verifiably worked.

What ties into this same strategy are Nintendo's Mini consoles which also raise awareness. That too works.

Why the Wii U failed

I already touched on this earlier in this post before I even read what you wrote here. I've been typing my response in pieces, reading one of your sections and then immediately writing a response. You wrote a lot in this particular section without identifying the real causes.

Conclusion

Your essay is okay as your personal perspective, but nobody should take it as a history lesson, because your essay has holes like a swiss cheese when it comes to financial matters.

Still only very few games, it doesn´t even reach 1% of the 3ds library, which currently has 1254 games. And most of them are different games, even if they´re on the same franchise.

What I mean is that the 3DS library had way, way more to offer than the WiiU library. There were a ton of Jrpgs, puzzles, strategy games, rhythm games, visual novels, applications etc. The 3ds even had ports of stablished fighting franchises like Street Fighter, Tekken, Dead or Alive, BlazBlue.....  The WiiU failed because its game library did not have much to offer in terms of variety.  Game releases were sparse, at best. 

That´s not to say that the WiiU did not had great games, but their number wasn´t huge enough to generate interest among non-Nintendo fans.

See how the 3ds is still selling around 60k weekly? That´s not only due to its low price but also due to its library of games. This really highlights how different their library were. Apples and oranges, basically.

All other points in the article are accurate. Thankfully, the dark ages of Nintendo seems to be over

I skimmed through the replies and saw people saying that this is a good writeup. That tends to make me suspicious, so I began to read the original post in earnest. Unsurprisingly, it repeats many of the flawed views that people have accepted as the truth despite evidence to the contrary being out there.

2011

The stage for a dark age is set in advance. If you understand that, then the beginning of the dark age is E3 2010, a press conference that was actually widely agreed upon to be great. But it's at that time that the 3DS was unveiled, the console that led to Nintendo's first loss over the course of a full financial year since they had entered the video game business. People are always quick to blame everything on the Wii U because they only look at unit sales, but it's the 3DS that began to dig the hole. Nintendo fully banked on stereoscopic 3D selling the hardware, so they didn't prepare much first party software in parts because of that; their other reason to go soft with Nintendo games is that they believed that fewer Nintendo games will lead to higher sales of third party software. The fundamental flaw in this thinking is that third party software is rarely good enough to sell Nintendo hardware, therefore such a strategy hurts everyone. The correct approach is to go hard on Nintendo games, because that boosts hardware adoption rate and everyone benefits.

The complacence regarding the 3DS created a domino effect. Nintendo did not only have to take their first loss in the fiscal year ending March 2012 because of the early 3DS price cut, but they also had to pull developers from Wii U projects to finish key titles for the 3DS faster. The eventual result of that was the completely broken software pipeline for the Wii U, because Wii U games had to be delayed in the aftermath of getting the 3DS back on track.

2012

The Wii U's main problem was not the name, not the marketing, and least of all it wasn't that "people were put off by the Wii." The Wii U's problem was the exact opposite: It wasn't a proper successor to the Wii. The most obvious key factor is that Nintendo relegated Wii Remote and Nunchuk to a tertiary control option and didn't even bother to provide improved versions, but rather just said that people should buy the Wii accessories. That's the same strategy they used during the transition from GameCube to Wii when GC controllers were a tertiary control option, but consider that for Wii it was a sound strategy because the GC was a failure. It's perfectly fine to make drastic changes after a failure and pursue a different direction. However, it is completely braindead to reject your success and return to an evolution of a concept that already failed you before. The Gamepad is the evolution of the GC to GBA connectivity; if the control setup isn't obvious enough, consider that Nintendo Land incorporated gameplay of various GC to GBA connectivity titles. The Wii U's main problem was that it was a repackaged GC and the market saw through it, so the Wii U followed the GC trajectory in sales.

Your summary of Wii U games is terrible. You call Pikmin 3 long-awaited when it is an IP that has never sold much on any console; Pikmin is utterly forgettable and disposable when it comes to hardware sales. New Super Mario Bros. U keeps getting the blame for sinking the Wii U, but in reality it is the only thing that kept it from doing even worse. Consider these two important factors: For one, NSMBU had an attach rate of ~60% in the early going because it was just about the only game worth buying on Wii U, and two, every single Nintendo IP has failed to turn around the Wii U afterwards, including Mario Kart 8 which proved its real system-selling power on Switch three years after its Wii U release. What you have with Wii U is similar to a Virtual Boy situation where it doesn't matter how good the software is, because the market doesn't want the hardware. Of course the Wii U was not as bad as the Virtual Boy, but if that's the only thing Wii U can outdo, you have a real mess on your hands.

You call the Wii U's launch a success, but it absolutely wasn't. Not only did it miss its forecast, but its sell-through was terrible on top of that. That's why shipments in the following quarters were abysmal, because the system had already failed at launch.

2013-2014

Third party support for Wii U was already on its way out at E3 2012. By December 2012 there was a list floating around on the internet that showed that ~80% of announced multiplatform games were not in development for Wii U. Remember, that was still before the PS4 and Xbox One, so processing power had nothing to do with those decisions. And remember, at that time third parties couldn't have made their decisions based on sales either, because sales data had yet to come in.

The crucial point you forget to mention for this period is January 2014. Nintendo revised its shipment forecast for Wii U down by 6.2m, from 9m to 2.8m. Satoru Iwata talked about Nintendo's next generation in January 2014. While Iwata had allowed the company to go ahead with its headscratching decisions to make the 3DS and Wii U, he had come to his senses at that point. He knew that the current generation (3DS and Wii U) were all about damage control at that point, and that he had to plant the correct seeds for their successors.

Nintendo had no faith in Wii U anymore. Their forecast for Wii U for the fiscal year ending March 2015 was 3.6m, a pathetic figure. The reason why Nintendo kept releasing Wii U games for years after they had recognized that it is a failure is that Nintendo is in it for the long term. They couldn't expect people to buy another console of theirs if they stopped supporting their current one.

2015-2017

It doesn't matter if you believe NX wasn't announced because of the announcement of Nintendo making mobile games, all it means is that you are wrong. Announcing the next console generation at that point in time instantly curbstomped all speculation that Nintendo might stop making consoles.

The main purpose of Nintendo's mobile games is to raise IP awareness and get people to buy Nintendo consoles and games. That verifiably worked.

What ties into this same strategy are Nintendo's Mini consoles which also raise awareness. That too works.

Why the Wii U failed

I already touched on this earlier in this post before I even read what you wrote here. I've been typing my response in pieces, reading one of your sections and then immediately writing a response. You wrote a lot in this particular section without identifying the real causes.

Conclusion

Your essay is okay as your personal perspective, but nobody should take it as a history lesson, because your essay has holes like a swiss cheese when it comes to financial matters.

?

I liked reading that (partially because I'm a sucker for well explained timelines) and think it's a decent retrospective of the era.

And now I'm going to nitpick it.

• I would argue that the Dark Age began as early as that period in mid-January 2011, when the launch dates and games for the 3DS were announced. Up through the end of 2010, I remember that most people assumed that the system wouldn't launch any higher than $200, and were speculating that games like Ocarina of Time 3D would be available at launch and games like Animal Crossing would be released soon afterwards. Then all the sudden it was "$250 for the new Nintendogs." The buildup for the Wii U was definitely worse, but this is where troubles began.
• People talk a lot of trash about New Super Mario Bros U, but when Nintendo replaced Nintendo Land as a bundled game with NSMBU (Autumn 2013), sales increased. Not by a lot, but it suggests that the NSMB formula had more appeal in even in 2013 than the GamePad gimmick did.
• EA's official word on the Wii U in 2011 vs 2012 probably should have notified us that third party support would dry up fairly quickly.
• I think you missed an oppurtunity by not highlighting Rayman Legends. From its initial announcement, it was a centerpiece for people hopeful for third party support of the Wii U. Even after it was delayed into 2013, hype was solid. The news in February that the game was being further delayed specifically because the game was no longer exclusive was the moment a lot of hopeful people stopped being hopeful.
• Morale was NOT still high in 2014. At that point, both Nintendo and fans seemed fairly certain that this was a GameCube type situation. I suspect this is why the Wii U MSRP in North America hasn't changed in FIVE YEARS.
• Wii U sales increased by about 20% from 2013 to 2014. It's not a ton, but 2013 had a price cut going for it.
• I think you've overlooked the importance of the 3DS. Had the 3DS done as well as the DS, things would have been brighter. However, especially after 2013, the 3DS had some serious problems. When the DS had its third full year of sales in 2007, hardware sales increased by 42%. For the 3DS in 2014, hardware sales DECREASED by 32%. Or for another comparison, think about the games released later in their lives (besides main series Pokemon). Even in 2009, the fifth full year of its life, the DS was getting big games like Dragon Quest 9, Tomodachi Collection, Professor Layton, Bowser's Inside Story, Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Scribblenauts, and Grand Theft Auto. The 3DS in 2017, on the other hand, had Dragon Quest 11, an updated version of Monster Hunter Generations, and... yeah, that's about it.

And now because I'm worried that you might think I was insincere at the top of this reply:

• The early confusion regarding the Wii U brand is not the primary reason it failed, but you are correct in that it hurt.
• The lack of a system seller for the GamePad in particular WAS crucial.
• Your roundup of 2015 and 2016 says most of what needs to be said.
• Seriously, good read.