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NoirSon on 13 August 2013
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Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:
Osc89 said:
curl-6 said:
Osc89 said:
Well the Wii U isn't doing anything to help fight the "Wii was a fluke" argument. And the other statements are true, so I don't really get the thread. What is the other narrative?

The other narrative is reality; that the Wii did happen, that it was a premeditated, planned success that sold 100 million units through brilliant business decisions, not luck.


These narratives don't seem to be mutually exclusive though. In order to create any product there have to be numerous business decisions to determine the strategy, something that Nintendo must have got spot on for every stage of Wii development. No one can tell the future though, so there is always luck involved. They wouldn't have known what 2006 would be like in 2001.

For example, what if MS had come up with pretty much the same motion controller and sports game and released it in 2005? The Wii would have flopped, but it wouldn't mean good business decisions became bad ones. Just bad luck instead of good.

Of course there's always luck involved, but the narrative being pushed is that Nintendo didn't know what it was doing, took a random shot in the dark, and got undeserved success through luck alone. This isn't true, the Wii was very specifically designed and planned to do exactly what it did. They didn't hit their target by blind accident, they took careful aim and scored a bullseye. (Something they've utterly failed to do with Wii U)

I would more or less agree with that, however it's hard not to admit Nintendo's overall performance in the console business post-SNES colors the discussion considerably.

If Sony's history in the game console business looked like this

Playstation 1 - 33 million LTD (ala N64)

Playstation 2 - 22 million LTD (ala GCN)

Playstation 3 - 100 million LTD (ala Wii)

Playstation 4 - just launched, epic disaster of a 1st year. (ala Wii U)

A lot of Nintendo fans would probably be inclined to say the PS3 was a bit of a fluke.

I do think the Wii was certainly an anamoly (a brilliant executed one, but an anamoly just the same). It's not a repeatable formula because it basically relies on the company coming up with some unbelievable, industry shaking idea every 5-6 years that has the same impact. It's just impossible.

Technically, it isn't an anamoly, because what Nintendo did with the Wii in not trying to match the competitor's system's power due to the costs it would add to their development is what they had done with their handheld systems several times.

The DS vs PSP plus the Gameboy/GB Color vs GameGear/Nomad, Neo Geo Pocket/Color and Bandai's Wonder Swan/Color/Crystal. The only reason I can't say the Gameboy Advance didn't do it was because despite being stronger the N-Gage could hardly be considered a legit competitor. Heck, the PS2 was weaker then both the original Xbox and Gamecube from a technical stand point but like Nintendo had done with the Game boy and would later do with the Wii, they provided the games people wanted to play and unlike the Wii enough developers latched on to make it the baseline console despite more power being available else where.

The Wii was Nintendo coming off a bad console generation where they lost a lot of support and they took a risk no doubt influenced by the recent success of the DS and its expanding into new markets with its unique controls of a less powerful system but with unique controls. In a way, they were on the spot, at least in regards to Japan because the recent console generation MOST Japanese developers have drifted away from internally developed HD games toward handheld and mobile games due to costs. The problem is that the developers were following the Japanese consumers and those that developed popular Western games which were still selling on home consoles just stopped developing for their system or provided gimped ports hurting Nintendo's brand just as badly as the Gamecube's initial purple lunchbox look and the mini discs.

The Wii U could have sold well even with the current range of specs, Nintendo was just lazy, cheap or stupid in their preparations for HD development and didn't have the games or even the promotion to get people to want to buy units.