@MrPhishfood
I don't disagree. Nintendo are totally hitting that market for children and with the Wii were able to attract alot of people who don't normally buy games. That's kind of the point I was making though, Nintendo in recent years has not been as good at attracting what might be called 'core gamers'. It's not a term I like using but there is definitely a difference between people like myself who play more complex games and who also play them more regularly, and those people for whom video games are a novelty.
I personally don't think it's too much to expect Nintendo to design a console which redresses the balance between the more casual friendly approach they took with the Wii and something which would be more appealing to 'core gamers'. There's a reason why the Wii plummeted in popularity in the last few years. Casual gamers bought a handful of games, got bored and moved on to 'Draw Something'. There were people like me who stuck around and continued to buy First and Third Party games, WiiWare games, and Virtual Console games, but that insane band of people wasn't enough to support the system. Most core gamers simply went to Sony and Microsoft.
@Adrock
I'm not smart enough to predict what might happen to Nintendo in the hypothetical scenario that the Wii U fails, lol. All I meant was that if it took something on the scale of a bodged system launch to turn the boat around then from a purely selfish perspective I'd be ok with that. I agree though, in all likelyhood Nintendo would not take the lessons I might hope they would from such a failure. Nintendo is a weird company and I don't think I'll ever fully understand their decisions.
I agree that Nintendo's huge success has been due in large part to their ability to walk their own path, but I also feel that their intransigence has been their biggest weakness. I do wish they would take what has been proven to work and which is popular and incorporate it into their own designs. Instead, however, they continue to fall down their own little rabbit hole.
Having one circle pad on the 3DS only to release not one but two versions of the circle pad pro, not having analogue sticks on the Wii U gamepad, having a touch screen on the gamepad which is far less functional than those screens which most people are now familar with, having a Wii U pro controller which does not have force feedback, offering only 32 GB of internal storage, these are all things which Nintendo has either not acknowledged as being issues or has chosen to ignore for cost purposes. You can also see this complacency in some of their games. Not having leaderboards in NSMB 2, not having online in Pikmin 3, their decision to release year old games digitally on eShop for full retail price. These decisions just seem bizarre to me.
True, Nintendo's bizarreness has helped to distinguish them in the market, but having gone through all this before as a Wii owner, I'm feeling a little weary of their wacky decision making. Ultimately, I just want something that isn't a chore. I don't want friend codes, I don't want poor online services, I don't want 8 and 9 month gaps in the release schedule, I don't want to have to use 3 different controllers, or motion controls, or tablet controllers. I want my games to be complex, engaging, challenging and, yes, I would like for the graphical capability of the system to not be a hinderance to the imaginations of the game designers. I want exactly what you've stated. I want Nintendo to gain a certain level of equality with their competitors rather than continuing to play catch up.
What I don't want is a Wii U, lol.