Yea. It amazes me how people are presented with actual facts, and instead of discussing around it, they just fall back on the same tired arguments over and over.
People still focusing on the names of the games, their budgets, their reviews, their boxarts. These are not the larger issue. ZombiU didn't fail to hit expectations due to any of this. As other people pointed out, many people who purchased the game, really like the game. The larger issue is that Nintendo put out a console that has sold roughly 1.1MM units NA in 9 months and has one Mario game with a 70% attach rate... and the next highest game, regardless of publisher, is 150k.
Nearly all of those users only want Mario. People bought the Wii because they wanted the Wii. They bought a ton of games with it because they were sold on the concept of what it did for them. The features excited them. They wanted to experience a lot of what it had to offer, at least for awhile. Publishers saw launch attach rates of 30%. You want that. You target that. You'll take 10% and 10% is good too... when the system itself has a ton of hardware momentum. Wii U doesn't. So you want 30%. Whose even getting 10% now? These are just rough targets and obviously not everyone builds their financing to these models, but attach rate is the best number to really look at here.
Nintendo needs to sell people on the Wii U tablet aggressively and get people to understand why the console itself is something they need. Right now, people bought the Wii U for Mario. You're fighting for scraps with around 300k users who are willing to buy more than just Mario. I really want them to succeed... I want everyone to, given I want the industry to grow, and someone has to target females and bring younger demo into the industry at higher price points than Apple and Android do, but the reason I probably spend more post-energy on Nintendo related things is because they really are in a bad spot, and they have to start repositinoing and spending and I'd love to see that happen asap.