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This is pure speculation, but I'm willing to bet that Iwata wanted the Wii U to be more like the switch, but the board was likely extremely nervous about cannibalizing their portable DS market, so they opted for the Wii U Tablet instead, to disastrous results.

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Wouldn't surprise me at all. Certain games on the Wii U even had a "tablet only" mode with a Switch-like experience, although the gamepad couldn't be more than a few yards from the console before losing signal, so it was only useful if someone else wanted to use the TV while you played a game. (You couldn't leave the house or really even the room.)

In the end I'm just glad the Wii U's failure didn't put Nintendo off tablet-style hardware altogether. Turns out that the console market and portable market merged quite nicely :)

I don’t think so personally. The Wii U was extremely cool. The tablet controller was an awesome trick but it was a very non traditional trick that wasn’t going to work with typical games.

NintendoLand, the free game that came with it, was really good. The pitch that I got was effectively “asymmetric local multiplayer with no screen sniping”. Which is conceptually a really interesting idea that was very fun in nintendoland. But… it’s not a vision that supports a successful mainline product.

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