Legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto reckons the Wii U’s launch was hampered by a high price point and soaring tablet sales.

Speaking with NPR during E3, Miyamoto said the Wii U’s price point “ended up getting a little higher than we wanted”, but added that if the system was appealing enough, people would have paid for it anyway.

“I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn't understand the system,” he said.

“But also I think that we had a system that's very unique — and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up.

“And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you're playing on a device that's connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play” he added.

“I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them.”

Nintendo’s willingness to experiment set it apart from the competition, Miyamoto said.

“Sometimes [experiments] work, and sometimes they're not as big of a hit as we would like to hope,” he said.

“After Wii U, we're hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.”

The Wii U’s sales struggles are well-documented.

In a financial results disclosure in May, Nintendo revealed that as of March 2015 it had sold a total of 9.54 million Wii U units since the system launched in 2012. By contrast, it took Sony about nine months to sell 10 million PlayStation 4 consoles, and about a year for Microsoft to do the same with the Xbox One.

However, all is not lost: December 2014 was the Wii U's biggest sales month ever, with console and games sales up 29 percent and 75 percent respectively on the same month in 2013.