[saghm]

Breath of the Wild released on the Wii U as well, as did the pre-deluxe version of Mario Kart 8 and what was at the time arguably the best Super Smash Bros game yet (some people prefer Melee, but Brawl was notoriously not great, and Ultimate obviously had not come out in the Wii U's heyday). I'm not sure good first-party games alone can completely carry a console; people need to be hooked in first before they start considering the platform, and the Switch had the most intriguing hook there's been so far.

[mpyne]

Honestly the Wii U had an amazing library of games. Nintendo squeezed a bunch of extra juice out of Switch using nothing more than straight ports of Wii U games onto the more popular Switch.

But like you say, the Wii U hardware just didn't fly off the shelves like Nintendo had hoped. Though there is a big difference between Nintendoland as a launch title and Breath of the Wild.

[astura]

The Wii U had some really fantastic games.

It really suffered, however, from having such wonky hardware and bad marketing. I own a Wii U, I own all the games you mentioned on it (other than BotW because I don't usually buy games at launch - I bought BotW on switch though) and I, personally, still found the hardware confusing.

It's really great that almost all Nintendo published games have had switch releases, because more people can experience them.

Nintendo has sold more than twice as many copies of the latest animal crossing game than they did Wii U consoles. Which is just crazy to think about.