LogFAQs > #975215097

darkknight109 posted...

I'd say that a lack of a marketable gimmick (the tablet just didn't do it for most people) and almost unarguably the single worst games library of any Nintendo console other than the Virtual Boy probably did a lot more to kill the WiiU than consumer confusion. The 3DS got over that problem by, shocker, putting together an excellent library of games; the WiiU failed to do so and it died as a result.

The name confusion was a big thing, with a lot of people thinking it was just a tablet addon for the Wii (made significantly worse by so many of the customers that bought Wiis being casual gamers that paid zero attention to the goings-on in the market), but I'd say the biggest reason it failed was that there were alternatives. Both the WiiU and the 3DS had a one-year headstart over their competition, and they both blew it: They had weak early libraries and poor marketing (and in the case of the 3DS, a particularly unattractive price point) that failed to communicate to the general public that they weren't just enhanced versions of their predecessors (as their names suggested they were). The difference is that when the WiiU blew its head start, the PS4 and Xbone came out with decent launches and third parties were happy to abandon the WiiU in favour of focusing on them (especially where the WiiU was weak enough that maintaining parity with the others for multiplat titles wasn't really an option). When the 3DS blew its head start, the Vita came out and was even more unattractively expensive and didn't offer the same opportunity for lower-stakes development that handhelds have traditionally been known for. That meant third parties stuck with the 3DS through its rocky start, while the Vita had an even worse start and died shortly thereafter, leaving the 3DS with a large library of great games.

SilentSeph posted...

I still think they should have called the handheld-only version Lite Switch

You could argue that they did, given that the Japanese typically say last names first.