Nintendo has reached another dangerous period of struggle. After reigning as the sales kings of the video game industry with their original Wii console, the Japanese video game company thought it would benefit from beating competitors Sony and Microsoft to the market with a new console. With that thought in mind, Nintendo launched its latest video game system – the Wii U – in November 2012, an entire calendar year ahead of Sony’s new Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.

Sadly for Nintendo, things haven’t gone according to plan. At all. As of the end of 2013, the Playstation 4 had sold 4.2 million consoles and the Xbox One was trailing with 3.1 million units. Comparatively, the Wii U has only amassed a lifetime sales figure of about 5.2 million consoles. So while Nintendo is still technically “leading the field” for this console generation, the company isn’t anywhere near as ahead of the curve as it should be given its hefty head start.

One problem for the Wii U – and for Nintendo in general over the years – has been its dearth of third-party gaming titles. Nintendo owns the most iconic and beloved franchises in the video game industry, from Mario to Zelda, meaning that its in-house development projects are almost always triumphs. However, the company doesn’t offer the same support to third-party developers as Microsoft and Sony do, leaving its stable of games looking pale and small in comparison.

A recent tell-all article published by EuroGamer – and titled “The Secret Developers”: Wii U – the inside story” – has shed some potential light on precisely why Nintendo struggles so much to get third-party titles on store shelves. The article, written by an anonymous third-party gaming developer, illuminates several issues with the Wii U and with Nintendo’s company structure as a whole that have likely contributed to the overall failure of the console.

For instance, the writer reflects on how early on he and other developers recognized the Wii U’s CPU chip as an underpowered entity that would greatly limit game development. The article also discusses how many hoops third-party game developers have to jump through simply to communicate with Nintendo’s Japanese headquarters, and provides insight into precisely what happens in the development pipeline that keeps many third-party Wii U titles from ever even seeing the light of day.

Perhaps most notably, “The Secret Developers” delves into the “Nintendo Network,” Nintendo’s first foray into the realm of online gameplay. Nintendo is incredibly late to the party with online play, since both Sony and Xbox started building their respective networks two console generations ago. Despite the need for Nintendo to play catch-up, however, the third-party developer wrote that no Nintendo executives or developers had ever even used Xbox Live or Playstation Network to see how things were being executed. In other words, Nintendo was attempting to build an online video game network from scratch, with little idea of how modern online gameplay even works. Not such a stunning example of “market research.”