The Wii has sold 97 million units worldwide. That places it as the 5th best-selling console of all time. The PS3 has sold 70.2 million and the 360 70 million. There is no way, shape, or form that the Wii was a failure to any line of reason, common sense, or fact. Sony CEO Kaz Harai has already stated than the PS4 will not be much more powerful than the PS3. Sony cannot afford to make a system much more powerful than the Wii U because they are losing billions of dollars in every single division they have. In fact, right now Nintendo actually has a higher market cap than Sony (Nintendo 15 billion, Sony 11 billion.) The dev kit for the PS4 have already gone out to developers and based on the information that has come back they are only slightly more powerful than the dev kits for the Wii U.
Its not all doom and gloom for Sony as a I mentioned earlier the PS3 is now at 70.2 million and it has leapfrogged the 360 in total system sales. Consider all the success Microsoft has had the past two years that is a good sign for Sony. I'm sure a lot of these bundles have help kick up PS3 sales. Just for the record I would like to explain that having the most powerful system NEVER WORKS in a console battle. Every console that has won a console war has either been weaker or the weakest of the bunch. The most powerful have always LOST. Least powerful or close to least powerful Atari 2600NES SNES PS1 PS2 Wii all won their console race. SG 1000 Atari 7800 NEO GEO N64 PS3 all lost or are losing their console race. Had the Dreamcast no been so easy to hack and had a DVD player it probably would have won it's console war too.
However because it was easy to mod and it did lack DVD, the next system up the ran away with it which was the PS2. It had a year start and even though the GameCube and XBOX were more powerful, their total system sales of around 35 million don't come anywhere close to the sales of the PS2 which are 154 million as the best-selling console of all time. So unless the 720 and PS4 offering something the the CASUAL consumer will want that theWii U doesn't offer, it's going to be an uphill battle for those two systems. The core audience is smaller than people think.
The reason why the 2600, NES, SNES, PS1, and PS2, and Wii won their battle is because the casual market got behind them. The Atari 2600 was a household name. Everyone had one. Then the NES took that to a higher level. The SNES didn't do as well as the NES but because it was the best deal for a 16bit system at the time it beat out the Genesis, TurboGrapx and NEO-GEO. The PlayStation came out just around the time CDs became really popular and gave casuals a nice CD player/video game system. With Sony known for their quality sound, it was a no brainer. Then thePlayStation 2 came around when DVD players were still quite expensive. Again, it gave casuals a inexpensive DVD player/CD player/video game system.
With the Wii, it introduced motion-control to the causal market. With it being as inexpensive as it was compared to the $499 and $599 360 and PS3, it became an "and" rather than an "or." In addition to the casuals flocking to go buy it, core gamers either had a Wii and 360, a Wii and PS3, or all three. So, based on history the Wii U has a bright future ahead of it. I'm not happy about the storage limitations myself, but it is far from a deal breaker. I don't need to be convinced about the power because their already sufficient evidence to draw a intelligent conclusion on that. People still asking questions at this point either are trolls or idiots. A GPGPU (with a custom CPU based on the Power7 architecture, and a ATI E6760 GPU running Direct X 11 and on-board memory,) plus, 2GB of system RAM is enough specs for me. The graphics shown for the Zelda HD and Japanese Garden Tech demo (which were both confirmed to not only have been whipped together in 3 weeks, but only used 10% of the systems power) was enough for me to see what this system is capable of doing.
Competition makes gaming more exciting and fulfilling for all of us. I WANT Microsoft and Sony to come out swinging with their next-gen consoles. That'll force Nintendo to up the ante, which will force THEM to up the ante, etc, etc. Wishing for a company to 'lose' is pretty selfish and stupid. People are going to hate Nintendo no matter what they do. I say to everyone hear whom has a brain to just sit back, and enjoy the ride.
not sure if i've seperated them into paragraphs correctly but hopefully its easier to read now. hope thats ok?