PixlBit

Historically, weaker hardware has been more successful than its competitor(s) more often than not. The problem with the Wii U in this regard is not that the hardware is behind, it's that it's too far behind AND it's not the leader.  PS2 for instance, had two failsafes: 1.) it was just powerful enough to run versions of the games GC and Xbox had (even if quite compromised, as was the case with Splinter Cell) 2.) failing that, it was the market leader and so received the lion's share of the 3rd party support anyway.

Is WiiU powerful enough to run compromised versions of the high-end 3rd party games that XboxOne and PS4 will have to offer? I don't know yet. If not, if the Wii U's capacity is too far behind, then being way behind in sales will be detrimental. If you have no market pull, than the 3rd parties can afford to ignore you.  

Nintendo didn't need the most powerful machine, or even an equally powerful machine. Better to be in the same ballpark, even if it's up in the cheap seats, and come in with a price lower than PS4, but higher than Wii U.  You can always price drop or draw up deals to pull in the general public, families, parents, casuals, etc. You can't raise the hardware if you come in too weak -you're stuck. And the Wii U isn't a continuation of the Wii 'philosophy,' so that price/hardware comparison isn't helpful, imo.

The branding is an issue. A big issue, one that I don't think is given the proper amount of gravity in the media or among the players on forums. The masses still don't know what the system is about, whether it's a peripheral or a new version of the Wii.

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Agreed.

The problem, though, is that third parties aren't even willing to port games that work on 8-year old consoles to the WiiU. EA put FIFA on the goddamn PS2 and PSP but not the WiiU; several big publishers (Take Two, Bethesda, Konami, etc.) don't even bother, despite stuff like GTAV and MGSV getting PS3/360 ports. Thus they won't even bring over games that work on much weaker hardware. That's how bad the relationship is.

And even if the WiiU was even in power, other issues come up. Nintendo has never released a console for more than $300 in it's entire history, regardless of what part of the market it was aimed at. How many people would pay $400-500 for a Nintendo box? Would people be willing to trust Nintendo's network infrastructure for multiplayer-centric games with the spectre of friend codes and the like? What would Nintendo do with that extra power to draw people in when they've spent years saying "specs don't matter"?

I'm skeptical that Nintendo would be able to address those issues, as they've been outright hostile to changing company strategies that alienate the core for a long time now. I never did believe them when they said they were going to make a big push to the core; given the WiiU's specs, how designing a small low-power box was a priority, and how basic stuff like portable account systems are STILL not available, I'm not anymore convinced. No amount of hardware power can fix that.

Yep, those are good points. I wanted to keep it within the realm of hardware power, but it is more complicated. 

If Wii U had even half of PS2 sales at this point, I bet FIFA would goddamn be on there. That recalls my point about being dead last. No market pull, not worth the effort.

3rd parties actively loathe Nintendo,as does the mainstram media. Nintendo doesn't play according to the agenda, or agendas, that the Industry (a 'cartel' consisting of major software publishers and the media sites they influence) wants to push, and they haven't had to for the most part. Conspiracy theory? Maybe, but I don't think so. From things I've read and little hints I've picked up, some of the big features that are/were going to be on the Xbone and PS4 are there at the behest of the 3rd parties, not in the interests of the consumer. Nintendo says no to that kind of thing, for better or worse.

And you brought up the branding issue in your article, and that thread continues into the imaging issue. Every brand or product has an identity that the mass market expects those brands/products to perform in accordance with. People expect a certain kind of experience, catalog, price point etc. from Nintendo. You are right to bring up the pricing history, which is part of their established image. The market isn't as malleable as some people might think. People want what they know. In Nintendo's case, that is a family friendly, relatively affordable, accessible, broad catalog. They want the NES, over and over. 

And then there is this effort to cater to 'niches.' I call them that, but they call them "demographics." I understand having a focus, but no console has been a major success only catering to core, or hardcore, or casual. The Wii could be brought up as an exception, but I believe a lot of core enthusiasts bought it when they thought it was going to deliver. And it still sold less than PS2, and slightly less than PSX (and population growth is a factor that Wii benefits from in that comparison). Point is, Wii wasn't JUST a casual machine, as JUST a casual machine would likely fail. Every successful console has had the attributes I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Even price: I think $300 and below is when consoles really start going mass market.  Which leads me to a btw: PS4's launch sales don't mean a thing. Launches don't tell the whole story. Launch sales are easy, especially when you don't have major shortages. Let's' see what happens in a year, or when a major price drop hits. Then we will see if there is truly demand for next generation.

I don't think it's conspiratorial at all. There are far too many major outlets that are willing to take the industry's claims at face value, and toe the party line without rocking the boat. The fallout over the Xbox One's DRM policies and price-performance ratio exposed that in a very stark, ugly way. It's like political coverage, where the news organizations either deliberately slant their coverage for ratings, or stay as non-committal as possible to avoid offending sponsors or risk losing access to key players.

And I'm not the least bit convinced that publishers weren't happy about the Xone's DRM policies, and hoping that Sony would do the same. Not after hearing the constant pissing and moaning over not getting a cut of used games, or the insistence that critics were wasting their time fighting against an inevitable future, or even devs like CliffyB stating that we technically don't own games anyway so why all the talk about consumer rights? Indeed, I suspect that Sony's push towards PSNow, which circumvents real game ownership entirely, helped placate third-parties enough to allow them to not put any DRM in the PS4.

I really can't think of what Nintendo can do with their next console to turn things around. I seriously can't. I don't know how they can pull the core away from PCs and the other consoles, or casual players away from smartphones and tablets. There aren't any major untapped markets left for them to tap into with their own dedicated hardware, so they have no choice but to compete with someone now. Something they themselves say they aren't good at doing.

Nintendo went with the Wii's choice in design consciously. They knew it would be useless to compete head-on with Sony (and Microsoft, to a lesser degree) in specs, so they went for cheap and widely available. It worked, although the third parties pushing ultra-expensive cinematic experiences didn't bite.

An optimal environment would be Nintendo's first-party combined with Sony's third-party community, which includes both Eastern and Western developers, but I think in order to get the benefit of such a pairing, it would have to be on Nintendo's terms rather than Sony's terms. An unintended consequence of Nintendo going third party, at least from the standpoint of gamers lusting after Nintendo's catalogue without having to buy the hardware to play it on, would be the inevitable narrowing of Nintendo's focus down to one or two cash-cow franchises that would occur. Much like Sega of today is pretty much all about Sonic, Football Manager, and Total War these days, with almost all of its other franchises on indefinite hiatus or stuck in Japan,  Nintendo would be pretty much nothing but Mario and Pokemon. Almost every third party developer nowadays trades on a small handful of successful cash-cow properties, with anything that isn't a blockbuster abandoned by the wayside. Even EA pretty much runs on annual Battlefield, FIFA, and Madden anymore.

On a related note, I know a lot of analysts are really pushing for Nintendo to move into the Android/iOS space, but I don't think Nintendo would be very successful in that space. The economics of the mobile market would set Nintendo up to fail. Freemium and 99-cent games have created a race to the bottom in the mobile space.  Mobile players piss and moan if the price goes up any more than that. The market rewards them with games that are accordingly low in production values and design that are little more than blantant cashgrabs. The mobile space may be a far bigger ocean than the hardcore space, but flood any ocean, no matter how big it is, with shit, and nothing but parasites can survive in there.

"The mobile space may be a far bigger ocean than the hardcore space, but flood any ocean, no matter how big it is, with shit, and nothing but parasites can survive in there."

Perfect description of the mobile market right there. Given Nintendo's committment to avoiding the devaluation of their brand, moving to mobile would be anathema to their entire philosophy on games. I don't want to see what comes out of that.

And that's another big reason I don't want Nintendo to go third party. Even while the WiiU is selling like trash, they're still doing wonky little games like that Gamecube remake with the robot where you take pictures and stuff. Having to compete on someone elses' ecosystem would lead to retrenchment into their safest franchises. It's strange seeing complaints about too much Mario alongside calls for Nintendo to abadon hardware in light of that.

I'm fine with the graphics of the Wii-U. I always wanted cell shaded and non realistic games for my Nintendo systems anyway. PS4 and X1 can do that stuff. I'm going to be perfectly happy playing Pikmin 3 and Zelda Wind Waker HD just as they are.

It probably wouldn've hurt it though. I think there have been some repots on record that after a third party released a title on the WiiU they thought twice about doing it again upon seeing how deficent the system was in some technical aspects.

True the N64 and the GC had very powerful system specs, yet their use of carts/mini discs hurt then in the long run due to their limitations. Though the Wii was able to overcome it's limitations the same can't be said for the N64/GC/WiiU. Sure having a powerful system like the WiiU may not make or break the system but every little bit could help in the end?