As Pachter said once,the guys in Nintendo are either delusional or lying. Perhaps the first.
Nintendo is quite incompetent,and they don't even seem to care.
#1 First of all the last new franchise they made that targets the 'core' gamer and not casuals who play things like Wii Fit or Music or whatever and had a full retail release,is Pikmin from over 10 years ago. For 10 whole years Nintendo didn't made any new series.
#2 Regarding hardware,they have already said that they don't want to compete with the other guys,so this is just a shot io the foot by their own self. They just boldly say to themselves and everyone else they can't do it.Yet they still trying to since they keep making consoles,but they say to everyone they are not doing it.I have trouble realising the logic behind this.
#3 Their software became stale and lost part of its charm. The hot thing about Mario was that he was like the "Mercedes S Class" of gaming. If there was some new technology coming up Mario would be the first game to have it. Super Mario Bros was the first game with a higher pixel count than Atari,and also the first game ever where the player's character could actually jump. Super Mario World was the first 16bit game using so many thousands of colors for the first time. Mario 64 was the first ever 3d platformer.Mario Galaxy was the first ever Motion Controls game. But what is New Super Mario U or Super Mario 3d World has that its new ? Because it surely isn't the second screen. Nintendo DS is being doing that for 10 years.
This time around Mario has absolutely nothing new. And that makes the new game to be more "samey" than any other Mario ever. Of course not all games have to innovate,but Nintendo already made a back step with story writing,they did it with graphics,they did it with online... The game has to be up to standards to at least a single aspect of it for it to sell.
If you make a game and its graphics are not up to standards,its story is not up to standards,its music is not up to standards,its gameplay is not changed,it just becomes so much like another game that came before that people who bought the game before won't buy the new one.
#4 Have anyone noticed that if you search "Mario Games" on Google you will find thousands of Mario games that are not made by Nintendo but you can play them for free ? That's not piracy I'm talking about here,neither emulation. I'm not talking about people making console games to run on PC,but people developing up their own selves Mario games and releasing them for free to the public. Nintendo is the only console publisher that allows that. In fact they don't officially allow that,they just don't care enough to do anything. They care so little about their franchises that you can make a Mario game yourself and host it on your advertisment filled website and make money out of it,without ever contacting Nintendo or have them tell you something.
#5 At the same time they are officially quite unfriendly to 3rd party developers and indies. The things they require from a developer to allow them to release a game for their console are responsible to a great part for the bad support of 3rd parties for WiiU,but Nintendo DOESN'T CARE.
For a developer to release a WiiU game he has to
a) Pay 10.000$ to Nintendo for the development kit and Developer License.
b) Already be in the business for at least a year,and have that last year at least 50.000$ per month profits.
c) Have the studio geared up with closed circuit cameras,keycards,and bulletproof windows because Nintendo is afraid someone will break into the studio and steal the development kit to find out its top secret hardware.
d) Have a publisher as a different legal entity.
e) Even after all of the above are done,there is still no gurranty that your game will be released on the system because it might not pass Nintendo's qualifications,and at least until now they don't have on their developer website a set of guidelines / rules of what element could make them cut a game.
For comparison reasons,I post the requirements Steam (PC) has for allowing a developer to release the game on that platform.
a) The game should not be porn.
b) The game should be a stable,playable product.
c) You pay once a 100$ fee.
d) The allowance of your game getting released on Steam is based on the community. Each Steam user can vote if he wants a game to be released on the platform or not,so its a democratic process that puts the probability of a game seeing the light of day to gamers.
Nintendo are still too many years back in their 3rd party support once again. They have missed the indie booming,and they still live in a world were consoles were made by completely custom hardware,and nobody with a screwdriver who knows how electronic products would just open the box to post pictures on the internet. DSL connections have become affordable for so many years,and in the developed world at least each family has a machine connected to the internet. It's not the 80s any more were only a few mega-corporations had internet. The requirement for a different publishing entity and not allowing people sell games they make on their own apartments,is not allowing indie devs to join the platform. Nintendo openly says to these guys "I DONT WANT YOU" with their 3rd party policy.
So to sum it up,WiiU's bad sales aren't because of bad luck. Neither there are "dark forces" fighting Nintendo. Nintendo is doing their own selves harm,by not caring and not conforming up to modern standards. Not only hardware standards,but also policy standards,market standards,price standards,whatever. They are stuck in doing things the way they were done 20 years ago,but the world has moved,and they haven't progressed,in fact they have gone backwards. Nintendo CAN become succesful,and it CAN become competitive,and it also CAN change the tide. They are the richest video game publisher company for God's shake,they have billions and they could bail out a small country.Its all a matter of decisions. They are overpricing their software so much that they think it will sell even if its a game with 360.000$ budget,made in 6 months by a team of 30 guys while at the same time there are games like GTA5 and The Last of Us which cost about 100.000.000$ to be made. Since they are so STINGY,being the RICHEST of them all and at the same time producing the CHEAPEST to make games that are called by journalist "AAA" titles,the only one to blame is Nintendo itself.
I've played games made by teams sized of about 16 people who worked on them on their free time WITHOUT ANY BUDGET AT ALL having higher quality graphics,sound,whatever,than the games Nintendo makes. How comes the biggest and richest publisher of them all comes up with products that are surpassed by even games made by bunches of highschool friends with zero budgets ?
In fact it's a miracle even survives all these years following this way of doing things. I'm amazed what happens with the WiiU didn't happened earlier.