A Look at the Nintendo Dark Ages (2011-2017)

[Illusion]

Nice article. A lot of your points brings back nastalgia and memories of old VGChartz discussions.

I really think that the Wii U's failure boils down the gamepad. Nintendo simply failed to show how the gamepad could be used to revolutionize gaming. Super Mario Maker (which came out way too late in the Wii U's life to matter) actually did this and really could have done something for the system. I believe that if Nintendo had made Super Mario Maker a launch title for the Wii U, it might have doubled the systems lifetime sales and made the Wii U a preferred platform for sandbox gaming as that is really the one thing that the gamepad can be used for that a traditional controller cannot compete with.

The problem is that Nintendo failed to do this and the gamepad became an expensive paper weight for the system. It was expensive to produce and required a lot of processing resources to render the second screen: the gamepad is a big part of why the Wii U was so under-powered and couldn't compete even with consoles released 6-7 years before it. Furthermore, the gamepad was ugly and clumsy looking (unlike the sleek NS), its touchscreen used a stylus making it obselete before it hit the market. Nintendo had hedged everything on the gamepad they way they did with the WiiMote in the previous generation, the problem is that for the Wii everything worked in Nintendo's favor and Nintendo barely even had to make a game to make the WiiMote catch fire, but for the Wii U everything worked against them.

I still think that the Wii U could have been a 25-30 million selling console, but it would have required a lot of effort from Nintendo when Nintendo just wanted an easy win like they had with the Wii (ie. it needed brilliant games like Super Mario Maker to justify its existence early on). Nintendo, obviously thought it would be more profitable to just kill the Wii U and dump everything into the NS then to rehabilitate the Wii U. It was obvious that Nintendo had completely given up on the Wii U by late 2014 when Miyamoto was already hinting at new hardware.