Hm, interesting...I do want to pose one question though: on the grand scheme of things, despite this mass marketing promotion of their first party/exclusive games, the Wii U is still seem as a "failure". Would you say that the original Wii had much better promise during its time? And even the Gamecube (as...uniquely shaped as it was, the library for GC games was massive.)?
Well, I'd say it's a combination of things.
The Wii was marketed rather aggressively, and it was marketed largely on the basis that it was family friendly. Hell, it was in the name. More than that, compared to the other consoles of that generation, it was cheap and it only got cheaper. Kids wanted it and they wanted the massive amounts of licensed/shovelware on the title. How weak it was by comparison and the gamers that looked it over because of that were not nearly enough to overtake the revenue that came about because of this, and it helped that the games on it that did do well, most notably Super Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess, are pretty revered even today. But that wasn't even the end. It helped that its launch was pretty strong (moreso in quality than in number). Numbers were high, more devs got on board, and it accrued a massive library. The motion controls certainly helped as many devs either saw potential in them or saw that the novelty of them would resonate with the more casual crowds.
The Gamecube...I should say I'm less keen on. It's constantly praised for having all these games but I don't particularly remember it having all too many- of course, I was young and what I could get was limited, so who knows. But I will say that it was a different story. At the time, Nintendo didn't really have a reason to focus on marketing to a specific age group. They were headlocked with the Playstation 2 and, thanks to having superior hardware in certain areas, they were pretty confident. If I recall, it wasn't the easiest to develop for, and it was somewhat bottlenecked by its use of mini-discs which I still, for the life of me, do not understand why they used. That said, its power made it incredibly viable for core devs and just as much of an opportunity as the PS2.
The Wii U, on the other hand, had some particularly big problems. The architecture for the system- mainly thanks to the inclusion of the gamepad, make the system something of a hard sell for devs. Some devs don't develop for it not because they think it's too weak, but because they don't want to have to deal with the gamepad. I'd say that this is pretty fair, especially when you consider that by nature the gamepad creates more effort for ports. Plus, they see little reason to develop for it because it has short bursts of success rather than a consistent stream, which doesn't really make it all that attractive for those that want their games to succeed or even be known. That coupled with the system's power is why we didn't even see as many ports as the Wii did. There was also a big separation between when things would be announced and when they would release, and similarly the appeal of those releases wasn't nearly as wide as those of the Wii. Plus there was the confusing announcement and the more confusing naming, which weren't major factors but certainly contributed to some extent. But really, if I'm to be truly honest, I think that Nintendo really should have gone for quantity with the Wii U. People were pretty pissed at this year's E3 because, well, they didn't announce much (veeeery little for the Wii U), and this is a problem because it doesn't have much in the way of a release calendar even now.
