It may have done better if Nintendo didn't take so long to develop and release it.

I bought one on eBay, and it's a quirky device. It's essentially a glorified floppy drive with proprietary disks, and it makes loud, albeit amusing scanning noises.

Every Nintendo console prior to the Wii had some sort of "expansion" or upgrade capability for future peripherals to be added. Hardware revisions took the place of this model.