Nintendo Ending Wii U Production Later This Year, Says Report (polygon.com) 230
An anonymous reader cites a Polygon article: Nintendo will end production on its Wii U console sometime in 2016. The console, which has sold poorly compared to its wildly successful predecessor, debuted in 2012. According to Nikkei's report, Nintendo has already stopped manufacturing certain Wii U accessories. The outlet, which has a good record of reporting on Nintendo's unannounced plans, reports that while Wii U hardware is being discontinued, a launch of the company's next platform -- codenamed NX -- is not guaranteed this year. Nintendo plans to unveil its next-generation console sometime in 2016. The company launched its first mobile app, Miitomo, last week.
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There is no evidence that people are willing to drop $50+ on an Apple game.
You do not understand the market presence of Mario. And Nintendo, if they're true to character would be in line with the Apple way of things "Get it right" as opposed to "Throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks".
I'd buy it, if it was at all decent.
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I well understand mario, I own the WiiU... But look at the games that have any success on mobile devices, all free to play and short level durations.
I think that is starting to change as the market matures...
There are only so many coins and strawberries that you can sell before people grow tired of the idea...
Our house played a lot of that stuff over the past few years, but in 2016 we made a decision to cut off most of the "F2P games", since most are simply "P2W games". Oh sure, Frozen Free Fall can be won without a dime, but it gets old and clearly at some point you're supposed to pay.
I'd much rather just pay $5-10 for that game and remove IAP forever
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Apple just released a new Apple TV. Given how long it takes for them to update these things, I wouldn't count on a new one for another two to three years.
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Apple is atypically enthusiastic about doing things in house; and even the stuff they have no interest in doing internally, they really don't like being beholden to anyone. Would they like Nintendo titles for their app store? Sure. Would they leave Nintendo to wallow in the morass of underpromoted app-store-slurry if they thought Nintendo was gettin
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Re:Partner with Apple and be done with it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Library over raw power (Score:2)
i guess from the n64 up thats a pretty much truth. PS was more than n64, xbox and ps2 more than gamecube and so on and so on.
Yup.
That's because they know that at the end, it's the library of games that is the most critical for attracting players to a platform.
Back in the 8bit and 16bit era, doing absolutely anything did require expensive hardware. So the NES and SNES were as expensive as anything else around.
(Except maybe the NeoGeo that was insanely more expensive than anything else, being basically a full-blown arcade platform packaged into a home console plastic shell, running arcade board packaged into cartridge shells. Not a
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Meh, sounds like they would both loose what they care for the most: Total Control.
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watching Nintendo drag this on in obstinance is agonizing! SEGA did the right thing folding their hardware development
Even with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight what you're actually saying is that Nintendo should have followed some other path and given up a metric fuckton of profits that they made? I mean even with the last 5 years of losses they are still trillions of yen ahead of your strategy.
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Seriously, Nintendo isn't playing by the Sony / Microsoft rules. If you buy a Wii-U, Nintendo makes a profit. If you buy a Wii-U game, Nintendo makes a bigger profit. If you buy two dozen Wii-U games, Nintendo makes a bigger profit still. An Xbone or a PS4 sale are both a LOSS for Microsoft or Sony (and if they aren't now, they were when they were new and selling most of their systems), and then they hope to catch up later with game sales.
Nintendo has made a profit on every generation- the only variable
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Not this generation.
At launch, it was losing money [arstechnica.com]
A year later it was still losing money. [gamespot.com]
Only in 2014 did they stop losing money. [wiiudaily.com]
They sold 2/3 of the consoles before they stopped losing money. Therefore, the console lost money over it's lifetime (before you count game sales).
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Nintendo has made a profit on every generation- the only variable is how much.
No since the release of the Wii U Nintendo has not only suffered from low revenue but also made more losses than profits.
They may not be making a loss on each hardware sold, but so far they are struggling to break even with the initial R&D costs.
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Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million
SNES - 49 million
N64 - 33 million
GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for almost 4 years, at this pace it will end up
Different markets (Score:2)
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky.
It wasn't that much luck. It was a calculated move.
Instead of being yet another console maker, trying to market a console (with lower spec than the competitors) to hardcore gamers,
they have decided to attack a completely different market: casual player who hadn't played gaming console until then.
All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Yup. And that comes to the plan above.
If you restricted only the number of units who were bought by gamers that got a lot of games, you would probably find a number between the GameCube and Wii-U, showing the same d
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It wasn't that much luck. It was a calculated move.
Meh, maybe... it might be that... or it could just be luck, that happens too.
That's Nintendo distancing it self from the other player and trying something new.
Yea, but that doesn't work over and over, as the sales of the Wii U clearly indicate.
Now Nintendo has a lot of money, a lot of history, they aren't vanishing tomorrow. However, Sega used to be #2 in the game and they are more or less gone. Radio Shack used to be on every corner, and they are gone.
Nintendo isn't "owed" a future, they have to earn it. They have simply made too many mistakes over the years. N64 being cartridge.
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There simply isn't room for 3 consoles. There never really was. Look back in time at:
There is a big difference, though. With all the examples you gave - which are very good examples I will add - the consoles were all trying to compete for the same market. They each had exclusive titles, of course, but they were trying to compete for the same "gamer" market.
Right now we have three consoles, but only two are competing for the same market. Microsoft and Sony are both competing for one market; if you look at game sales numbers this is abundantly clear as both companies see the majority
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There is a big difference, though. With all the examples you gave - which are very good examples I will add - the consoles were all trying to compete for the same market. They each had exclusive titles, of course, but they were trying to compete for the same "gamer" market.
That is a fair point... The SNES and Genesis were the XBox and PlayStation of their day...
The Wii U clearly is not...
Microsoft and Sony are both competing for one market; if you look at game sales numbers this is abundantly clear as both companies see the majority of all games sold for their consoles are from the FPS genre.
Well, FPS and TPS (third person), I would lump those together). Sports is a big market as well, bigger than I think a lot of people give it credit for. The "other category" isn't small either, but it is smaller than those two markets.
Nintendo doesn't make any effort to attract FPS titles to the Wii or Wii U. They go for a different demographic entirely. Unfortunately, Nintendo never launched a competent marketing campaign for the WiiU that explained to Wii owners why they should upgrade; a large segment of the gaming public thought the Wii U was just a tablet add-on for the Wii and because of that never paid any attention to it.
Meh, even if they had, I don't know that it would have mattered.
When the Wii launched, the BlackBerry was the "big thing". Tablets didn't exist, and XBox 360
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Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
Nintendo sales can't be compared to other companies as they aren't sold as a loss leader and licensing deals are different. You say before the Wii they were heading down? Their profit and loss statements say they were a very healthy company with a stable ever so slightly increasing trend of profit even before it. The Wii was a positive anomaly but don't confuse that as the company's saving grace. Until 2012 they were doing just fine, even pre-Wii.
Depends on the perspective (Score:2)
Even with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight what you're actually saying is that Nintendo should have followed some other path and given up a metric fuckton of profits that they made?
Depends on what you're considering:
- yes, by attracting the as-of-yet-untapped market of casual gamer who never played consoles before to the Wii, they made indeed a fuckton of profit.
- yes, if you compare to other handheld consoles, the 3DS has won the portable console market...
BUT
That simply pales in comparison to the insane volume of unit sold and freemium cash earned by casual games in the various smartphone app stores.
Nintendo is very good at making catchy games. If it had already stepped into the app
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Nintendo is a very Japanese company. They would rather go out of business than enter into an agreement like the one you describe.
Re: Partner with Apple and be done with it (Score:2)
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Nintendo really needs to "get with the times" with their online multiplayer (or did they fix that with the Wii U?). No one wants to swap game codes to join their friends or whatever.
I'm sure this is because they primarily target a younger age and they want to avoid COPPA [wikipedia.org] rules and child privacy issues. I'm not excusing it, but it makes some sense.
If you wait a few years, you can get a used Wii U for cheap and New Super Mario U and Mario 3D World are worth it. And you get an HDMI upgrade to the Wii if you have one.
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Maybe it's because I'm older now but I don't think I'll ever buy a console again (Nintendo or otherwise). I'm a PC-gamer, if anything, so there's no room for a console in my opinion.
I didn't either, until I had kids... that changes it. :)
We own a PS3, a PS4, and a Wii U, but the Wii U doesn't get played all that much. We do have a selection of games for it, but frankly, there is just too much pulling at the kids to make it work.
The iPad gets more play time than the Wii U does, for example. The PS4 gets used the most out of the consoles and only the extensive game collection keeps the PS3 around.
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What you're going to see is steam machines flop horribly and wind up costing valve millions in the process.
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Uhh, Valve is paying out the ass to develop and foster the program - everything from Steam OS to the Steam Machines marketing and branding agreements to the controller to "encouraging" devs to port games to Linux are all part of one program designed to get people off of Windows.
Valve fears MS bundling a store with the OS, and in the past years spread a lot of FUD about MS locking people into ONLY using their store. It wasn't true when they started the FUD in the Windows 8 days, and it's not true now. The
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no, they're just paying for the development of the OS (you know, the expensive part) which nobody gives a shit about.
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If you think that then you don't know what you're talking about.
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...and yet nobody has made a successful steam machine.
People who understand Linux will just use their favorite distro and keep doing whatever they're doing. People who don't understand Linux will only see that they're giving up 2/3rds of their steam library if they move to a steambox and keep using Windows because it plays all their games. In the end, nobody has a compelling reason to care about the steambox except valve who has lost money on it.
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uuuh, there's no point in buying one because uuuh the machines available already do what the steam machine is promising - only better.
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Uhh, Steam Machines are more powerful than the current consoles and have more games available for them.
that is simply wrong. some steam machines are more powerful (but they are also a shitload more expensive), some are significantly less powerful.
Re:Partner with Apple and be done with it (Score:5, Informative)
The Wii did very well in the console arena, and both Sony and MS scrambled to copy the motion controls. They just didn't amp the Wii U up enough to continue competing this generation.
Hand held arena is still nintendo for the discrete gameplay device. Smartphones may be ubiquitous but you still see people putting a lot of playtime into their 3DS.
I've seen people demand nintendo drop out of the hardware business ever since the sega genesis, and it's always a fanboy of the competition who hates "kiddy nintendo" but drools over the games they have.
Wrong target market (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wii did very well in the console arena, and both Sony and MS scrambled to copy the motion controls. They just didn't amp the Wii U up enough to continue competing this generation.
I don't think that the motion control was the main selling point (though it did help a bit reach the target market, by distancing itself from hardcore platform, and by lowering the entry barrier using more intuitive gestures instead of complex controllers with more buttons than pimples on their nerdy users' faces).
I think that the main success of the Wii was due to targeting a completely different market, one which wasn't targeted yet (by console manufacturer, at least. That market is Apple's and Android's bread and butter):
the casual players.
Whereas XBox360 and PS3 targetted hardcore players (and people needing HD-DVD and Bluray players), the Wii was targetting people who weren't into games yet, and might be not attracted by the newest iteration of {insert_favorite_platformer}, but who would like casual and party games like Wii Sport and all the new franchises started around the Wii.
That was the main success of the Wii (suddenly all the pops and moms buying consoles), but also its main culprit:
- those casual player aren't that much interested into buying a new console every 24 months just because the new one has more CPU. They're just happy keeping the previous Wii around, and dusting it off and pop-in some party games whenever they have visitors around.
- the motion controls look (and are actually) simpler than a complex multi-game pad gamepad. The Wii-U's pad with its screen looks *much more complex*. That has probably put off a lot of casual gamer who don't very well understand what it is about.
(Nintendo should probably spent more communication effort in helping understand what this new invention brings as features).
In short:
- it's wasn't that difficult for Nintendo to find a way to sell new type of games to people who aren't used to buy them before (Wii success)
- it's much more difficult to get the same people who aren't used to buy a new console regularly and them buy an upgraded device (Wii-U flop)
Hand held arena is still nintendo for the discrete gameplay device. Smartphones may be ubiquitous but you still see people putting a lot of playtime into their 3DS.
There *are* still people putting a lot of time on 3DS. Mainly hardcore players, because nothing beats console's controller interface to play platformers and the like.
BUT
There are even way more people playing on their smartphones.
If you're a hardcore player and want to play {insert_favorite_platformer} while on the go, a 3DS/New 3DS is the platform to go.
But if you're just bored on public transportation and want to kill time, you just get out your smartphone and play a few rounds of whatever latest casual game has come out of PopCap/Zynga/and the likes. Your 5-minute time killer simply doesn't look wort shelling out the money for a portable console, when you already have the perfect platform in you pocket. (Although actually, some we'll end-up shelling out even more money in freemium payment than that).
Nintendo did try some non-hardcore games (all the various brain trainer seem like a direct mirror of Wii Sport) but with much limited success.
In home console, the casual/non-hardcore market was almost completely untapped, so Nintendo had a great success attracting them to the Wii.
While on the go, the casual/non-hardcore market was already been caterred to by the various app stores on smartphones.
The 3DS and New 3DS have completely dominated over the other portable console (like portable playstations). But that is completely dwarfed when compared to smartphone casual game usage.
I've seen people demand nintendo drop out of the hardware business ever since the sega genesis, and it's always a fanboy of the competition who hates "kiddy nintendo" but drools over the games they have.
Out of Points........MOD UP PLEASE (Score:2)
Not enough first-party content / Wasn't Hacked (Score:3)
The first Wii was different and innovative enough that it brought non-gamers in. But they lost focus with their core audience, some of whom don't even buy the console until there's enough games to justify the high cost.
I'm a platform gamer, primarily, and don't have time to try out new or innovative games. Starting with N64, they went to one Mario game of each "type" at most per platform. And with 3DS and Wii U they did a total of two types. With Wii, there was Super Mario Galaxy which even got a sequel. I own a total of 3 games for the Wii U and don't feel like there's anything else there for me.
They need to admit that Homebrew made them popular (unfortunately in small part to piracy). And I copied all of my Wii games to a hard drive for convenience - that still works on the vWii side of the Wii U, but the U side hasn't been opened up at all.
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It was all about not having anything compelling to continue on the gimmick of the motion controllers (whose gimmickness had already worn thin before the Wii-U released).
But you are right, Nintendo utterly failed to support it from a first-party perspective, and third parties had zero incentive to bother.
On homebrew, cool as Wii was with homebrew, financially that wasn't even a blip on the radar.
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financially that wasn't even a blip on the radar.
I think it is more than they knew. For people like me who are a bit preservationist and never 100% tire of old games, I wanted to own my media. I still have SNES and Sega Genesis games even though the hardware has long worn out thanks to high quality emulation. Knowing that my games have a chance to continue existing beyond my console is a huge selling point for me.
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They need to admit that Homebrew made them popular
Nintendo is popular because of homebrew? Nintendo, the maker of Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc.? Just when I thought Slashdot couldn't get its head any further up its own ass...
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Not because of the content that was created, but because it was their first time away from cartridges. I still have cartridges going back several generations that I can still play via emulation. A locked down system is just not working out for them.
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It's depressing - all you have is Super Mario 3D World and New Super Mario Bros. U, neither of which are particularly inspiring
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To be fair, they've been trying with a new Zelda for a long time...
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I'm lazy. I want to copy my Wii U games to a hard drive, and I want to unhide my games partition without having the U side prompt me to format it every time.
I see that it's getting there on Wii U, but the only launcher works from SD cards and not the HD. That's actually fairly workable since I only own four games, but I am not ready yet. On that subject, I should really start blocking updates now that I don't need any more updates.
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Wii Hate (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Wii Hate (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have kids (currently 8 and 4) and a Wii U and have not suffered any mishaps. They know not to do stupid shit because my wife and I have had high expectations of them from when they were very young.
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Indeed we have--the fact that Nintendo thought that, after decades of marketing its consoles to kids and having the reputation of making family-friendly toys, it could get away with selling a console where a giant, fragile $150 controller is the primary component.
Rob
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but i can tell you of the abuse ive put my controller through the screen has never cracked yet, including drops onto concrete basement floors from my lab so say 3 feet?
you have got to be doing some serious work to break the screen on that thing is all im saying. The argument you gave of "its a toy" with no regard to anything as if since its a toy it should never break or that you are so rich it doesnt matter. Not
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So lets make a console for children with a controller that costs 180 bucks to replace....
$50 to replace.
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Actually I was wrong, and frankly kinda shocked. I thought I had found a $50 replacement controller but it was the 'Pro-Controller'.
I apologize for my error. The best I found was $130.
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So lets make a console for children
You bought an expensive console with a touchscreen for a child? Why? There's many things wrong with the Wii U but this is not one of them.
slight bummer (Score:2)
not necessarily sticking up for the console or denying Nintendo's mistakes, but there are some really fun games on that platform. My kids and I have spent countless hours enjoying the hell out of Super Mario Maker, Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, and Super Smash Bros.
yeah, i know, that's a whole lotta mario, and probably a clue to its failure. but they are great games, what can i say.
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This has been their way for the last couple generations - both on the handheld and console sides. Release one of each type of game, stop developing first-party content, and then force everyone to buy a new console.
People like me could just keep playing new sequels of Super Mario World (or NSMB Wii) and never tire of it, as long as the level design was good. And re-using a game engine just makes sense - churning out a sequel or two would use far fewer resources.
Online play (Score:2)
I still enjoy playing mine. I just hope that they continue to support online play for a good, long time, because Mario Maker and Splatoon will be pretty worthless without it.
I mean, I get why they'd discontinue a marginal platform like this, but Nintendo lives and dies by brand loyalty, and it would make me feel WAY less loyal to have several of my favorite games suddenly become mostly unplayable.
This is normal... (Score:2)
Every other Nintendo console is worth buying. the Wii U fell on it's face because they aimed for the poor people crowd, but missed that the poor now have 60 inch 1080p tv sets.
The NEW Wii Wii U needs to support 4K out of the box, and ditch the stupidity of the $200 controller with a very low res screen in it.
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The WiiU actually has decent graphics. It is a bit better than the PS3 and Xbox360 which is more than enough for the kind of games it run. The difference is much less shocking than with the Wii which is the only non-HD console of its generation.
The Wii (not the WiiU) really was the only well known console I felt was underspecced. Others were in line with their generation and games made the difference.
Best Netflix viewing experience ever... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm sorry but I call BS. I have a Wii U, and I have a PS4. I can't comment about the xbox one (I only have a 360), but between the Wii U and the PS4, there's no question: the PS4 is *way* smoother both for getting into the app (it auto re-starts from standby mode and even keeps your spot), and the actual playing itself.
So I don't know how you came to this conclusion, but I definitely disagree from my own experience.
Nintendo needs to exit the console market (Score:2)
Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million
SNES - 49 million
N64 - 33 million
GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for 3.5 years, at this pace it will end up with
Post-mortem (Score:4, Interesting)
So the Wii-U more or less failed. Not quite as horribly as it seemed that it might at some points. As of right now, it's sold 12.5 million units, which is a few million ahead of the Dreamcast and Saturn, but almost 10 million behind the Gamecube. The PS4 and Xbox One both blew it out of the water. I don't think there's any one reason for this, but there are a lot of factors that all contributed:
1) The name. This was a really bad choice, as it didn't clearly differentiate the console as a sequel to the Wii, rather than an add-on for it. This caused confusion in the market, particularly in the casual/family market that supported the Wii. What's bizarre is that Nintendo had already been stung by this once, with the 3DS.
2) The timing. This was about as badly wrong as could have been imagined. The Wii had been dead in the water since 2010 or so. A successor late-2010 with the Wii-U's capabilities, when the successors to the PS3 and 360 were still years away, might have had a chance. But to launch with dated hardware (more on this later) at a time when Sony and MS were already spinning up their hype-machines for much more powerful consoles was suicidal.
3) Terrible launch marketing. The Wii-U launched in the run up to Christmas, which is an obvious enough choice, but had a near-invisible marketing campaign. It ended up getting buried by games such as Call of Duty in the pre-Christmas rush.
4) The wrong hardware. We know now from reports from ex-Nintendo staff that the company's key priority for the console was low power usage and noise and a small form factor; to make the thing an unobtrusive part of the living room. That's not a bad goal in itself, but it shouldn't have been taken to the extremes it was. A horribly underpowered CPU meant that in some respects, the Wii-U was outgunned by the (already elderly) PS3 and 360. Porting to the platform was also complicated.
5) A poorly designed gamepad with no clear USP. I've owned a Wii-U since launch and I still don't really understand the point of the gamepad. Very few games have made good use of it. It's unergonomic (just google "Wii U gamepad hand pain"), imprecise, cheap-feeling and, most bizarrely of all, virtually irreplaceable without buying a new console. The Wii sold tens of millions of copies on the quick-draw appeal of the Wii-mote, even if the potential of motion controls proved horribly limited in the longer run. The Wii-U, by contrast.
6) Terrible third-party relationships. This has long been a problem for Nintendo. They have a reputation in the industry as being arrogant and high-handed towards third-party developers. They promised this would improve with the Wii-U. It didn't. In fact, they royally pissed off a lot of the big names by failing to support their own launch so badly. Some publishers, particularly Ubisoft, invested heavily in the Wii-U launch, only to have their titles crash and burn because Nintendo didn't seem willing to put the effort into growing the installed base.
7) Underwhelming first-party games. This is the controversial one. The Wii-U does have some good exclusives, developed on a first or second party basis, but by and large, it has an insipid lineup. New Super Mario Brothers U and 3D Mario World were second-rate titles at best. Popular Gamecube and Wii series like Metroid went AWOL. Nintendo has a reputation for being an innovative games developer, but this reputation is largely misplaced. Its Wii-U library was generally composed of inferior retreads of familiar ground. There were one or two more innovative late-cycle games, like the first-party Splatoon and the second-party Xenoblade Chronicles X, but those were too little, too late.
The question is whether Nintendo can really fix all of the above problems with the NX, particularly given that they are, once again, going with a tricky mid-cycle launch (and that third parties have essentially given up on them).
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A horribly underpowered CPU meant that in some respects, the Wii-U was outgunned by the (already elderly) PS3 and 360.
Erm you do realise that since the Nintendo 64 they haven't actually attempted to or even remotely been in the same league of hardware as the other companies you mention, and furthermore nothing in the software is really missing things from the hardware. Porting to it? Because Nintendo users are all about playing first person AAA titles? The hardware is fine for the style of games that they release, and unlike some of the stuttering launch titles on the PS4 and XBone all the games are a perfectly smooth expe
what's in a name? (Score:2)
No reason to own one (Score:2)
I can't think of more than a couple games that would have even justified purchasing it. If Nintendo can't attract serious 3rd party games, I can't see many people getting it as a primary console and most kids want to play with their friends. Sure, it's great for casual gaming but casual gamers don't buy lots of games - especially at $50.
Shit, I've been a long time Zelda fan and couldn't even finish Skyward. That's what pretty much sealed the deal for me. I've had far more fun on Steam sales.
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Pulling the plug a little too soon, I say (Score:2)
However I also know more people who have purchased it in the past 8 months than in the first 2+ years it was out. I also know that I've been seriously considering purchasing one for myself some time after I figure out my taxes for 2015. I also know that my son really wants to play Mario Maker, Mario Kart 8, and Disney Infini
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it was powerful enough for designers to make high quality games, right? Then why buy a Wii-U?
When the price is right, I bought mine to get an HDMI port and access to two more games that I wanted to buy. That's it. But I really wanted HDMI out - component didn't cut it for me at all even on a 42" TV, since it was still only 480p signal with fuzzy edges.
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I don't think even nintendo knows. Hell, they haven't the slightest idea what their customer is anymore; they actually said "customers do not want online games" even after it had already taken off a decade earlier.
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Seriously? This non-answer gets Score: 2? It does not matter if what ArmoredDragon said is true or not. I'm outta here.
The question wasn't soliciting an answer so much as it was pointing out that Nintendo's latest console is a total flop. I offered an insight as to why Nintendo as a whole has been nothing but a flop for the past 20 years (Wii being an exception, but even then, its success was limited.)
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Now THIS (parent) is a useful post. The perk on the other hand seems pretty crazy.
You also said "I'm outa here" a post ago, and yet, you're still here.
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the huge Wii U LCD/controller seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me.
I think they were searching for convergence of mobile and console gaming, but failed miserably. You can play some content without a TV - including the entire Wii library - and that is a problem in search of a solution in households where there are TVs everywhere.
Re:What's a WiiU? (Score:5, Insightful)
the huge Wii U LCD/controller seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Did you see the announcement video for it? The President of Nintendo talked about how their goal with the successor of the Wii was to get all of the members of the family interacting with each other, instead of everyone living in their own little bubble (ie, staring at the small screen in their hand). What amazed me by that, is that Nintendo solved that problem with the Wii. Some of the best times on the Wii is spent with four people all holding one cheap controller, looking at the same spot, or at each other as they perform silly actions to accomplish the games task. Then when they introduced the Wii U GamePad, they all of a sudden made one person to be different than the others, and in their own little bubble. They already had the solution to the problem they claimed they were trying to solve, and then ran backwards.
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The Wii U screen controller is frankly a stupendously odd call. First, it should be pointed out the good: You can play games on it without being on the TV, and you can watch Netflix on it, etc. It has some of the features of a tablet, while being less expensive than them, and with much more graphics power. It also allows for innovative control methods and gives you two screens if a game needs them. ...and that's sort of the problem too. The Wii-U is a luxury item in the way that a Super NES wasn't- it'
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they sold more than 12 million of them by EOY 2015
And about 3 million of them aren't sitting in someone's closet right now.
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And 3 million went to Japan alone!
People aren't kidding when they say the Wii U is Big In Japan! It's likely higher than their US sales.
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To Hit Armor Class 0?
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"Save versus rods, staves, wands!"