Wii U: A Strategy For Success

[Scoobes]

UltimateUnknown said:

Your argument assumes that by setting Wii U to have a lower price for consumers, Nintendo can sell a ton of consoles and gain 3rd party support, which would then profit Nintendo.

But what exactly makes you think the same won't happen with the Wii U that happened with the Wii? The Wii had a low price (like you propose for the Wii U), it sold a ridiculous amount (again which you propose) and it had an innovative control scheme in motion controls (like with the tablet for Wii U). But did that get 3rd party support for the Wii?

Anyway I want the Wii U to succeed, but what you are saying is the exact same thing as what happened with the Wii. And I highly doubt they are going to sell the Wii U for $199. If anything, first party will end up selling Wii U in the end. They will get 3rd party support if they manage to up their game to the standards that the 3rd parties want which we will see in E3. So I guess we can reserve that judgement until then.

Not my argument, but I do agree with a good deal of the article. The difference to this gen from last gen is the Wii was

1. Severely underpowered relative to the competition

2. A complete unknown and expected by most to fail versus the HD consoles

This gen Nintendo have shown that they can sell a great deal of consoles and rumour has it third-party support is much stronger than it ever was at this stage prior to the Wii's release. We also know it can run the vast majority of modern game engines (UE3, Cryengine 3, Havok physics, Frostbite2, IDTech5 etc.) with UE4 not due until 2014.

Even if PS4/Nextbox are more powerful, I doubt we'll see the power differential from this gen where the difficulty in porting games to Wii was just too much of a challenge. With WiiU, I suspect Nintendo will be able to get a lot more ports that just weren't possible on Wii.

This is not even factoring in the masses of money Nintendo have accumulated in the last gen for marketing.