The Nintendo Wii U was officially announced during the in June of 2011 during Nintendo's presentation at the E3. While the Wii U was a new piece of hardware, the trailer did absolutely nothing to promote this as a console and instead focused o nthe "new controller", confusing a lot of consumers.
The console was released in November of 2012 and it became an instant flop, making the company lose a lot of money. The problem was that the console was very poorly marketed, and by the time the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One released in November of 2013, people had already forgotten about Nintendo's new console.
After a very rocky start, and an even worse life cycle, the Wii U ended up being discontinued in January of 2017, right about the time the Nintendo Switch—Nintendo's new console—was starting to make the headlines; eventually releasing in March of 2017 and becoming a hit overnight.
A new report reveals that Famitsu, the most widely respected video game magazine in Japan, is no longer tracking Wii U sales; being one of the last magazines that still kept track of the console's sales. Nintendo Life reports that the console was barely selling between 10 to 20 units per week; the other company that was tracking these sales was Media Create, that stopped analysing the Wii U's sales last year.
The Nintendo Wii U, as of today, has managed to sell 3.303.541 units in Japan, while the
Nintendo Switch has already been able to sell over 5 million units in Japan—completely outpacing the Wii U's sales in a bit over a year since it was released.
The Nintendo Switch is a by-product of the company's own failures with the Wii U, so all of the success that the Switch has got is mainly thanks to the Wii U. The Nintendo Wii U is far from a bad console, the problem was always Nintendo not knowing what demographic they wanted to cater to after the massive success of the Wii, but that's only a thing from the past and Nintendo has already shown that they can learn from their mistakes with the Switch; let's just hope they keep making the right choices with their new handheld hybrid console.