Nintendo Is Sorry For Wii U Load Times, Is Working On A Fix

Posted Wed, 19 Dec 2012 | 22:00 GMT by Damien McFerran

The clock is ticking

Satoru Iwata apologises for lengthy waits when switching between applications

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has publicly apologised for the lengthy loading times endured by Wii U users when moving around the console's operating system.

The comments were delivered in a Japanese Nintendo Direct broadcast. Iwata Admitted that the load times were an issue, and stated that a solution is currently being worked on. However, he stopped short of revealing a timescale for this fix.

Moving around the Wii U OS is certainly a sluggish affair, with some procedures - such as opening Wii U Chat - taking as long as 40 seconds in some cases. It's hardly a deal-breaking problem in our opinion, but it's nevertheless encouraging to see Nintendo has acknowledged this problem so quickly, rather than burying its head in the sand as many companies would do.

The issue was given more exposure recently when an irate Japanese woman posted this video on YouTube complaining about the long load times:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/12/nintendo_is_sorry_for_wii_u_load_times_is_working_on_a_fix

Maybe false: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=151695&page=1#2

Load times aren't that bad with the longest being about 18 seconds. They seem to be getting better from my experience. If they can cut it down to 5-7 sec max then I don't see any complaint.

updates are the real problem. took 2 hours to do a 42mb update yesterday and my intanetz aint that slowz. :(

nintendo should have tested the wii u better before launch with all these fw updates but i hope they get this fixed soon.

Yeah, I'm gonna wait until sometime next year to pick one up once they get all these issues ironed out and I don't have to do a 2 hour update the first time I hook it up.

yea it is better to wait a whole year instead of  2 hours

lies Nintendo can do no wrong, Nintendo is god

That's a bit excessive, I think, if that's your only reason for waiting.  Seriously, set it up, get the update going, then take care of chores, laundry, shopping, watch a movie, surf VGC or the net, relax, meditate, ponder life's mysteries...in no time you'll be enjoying the WiiU experience.  The wait times between some applications are a minor inconvenience, but that's just because the rest of the system is so quick. 

That and there's really no games currently out that I really want.  Maybe once Pikmin 3 is released I'll bite, because so far that's the only Wii U game that I really want to play.

I'm starting to think that all those updates will eventually make Basic SKUs useless because they will take the entire internal storage available.
Well, at least you can use extra storage via USB, but still...