Mr Khan said:
Barely. It lasted long enough that the successor was out, and that was about it. The key to the 2015 thing is "what do we replace it with?" Unless the system itself is so toxic to Nintendo's balance sheet that they don't care what they replace it with (which would be horrible for mindshare anyway), they need something with which to move forward. A handheld capable of running Wii U games could do the trick. Many Wii U games have a pretty small disc footprint to begin with, that you could put a lot of the mainstays (like Mario 3D World) right across without worrying too terribly much about storage. From that point, you pursue a three-pronged strategy: the Quality of Life platform pursues the same crowd that the "Touch Generations" brand pursued in the Wii/DS era. The handheld is their "mainstream" game device, garnering development support from Japan and, perhaps, hooking up with Android so that they can get Western mobile support. Handheld comes with an optional home-dock for local multiplayer, and the home dock could also support some "high-end" games, through extra graphics tech on its side. |
People have suggested a temporary replacement hybrid that lets you play Wii U and 3DS.
Either way, discontinued officially or not; the effect will be the same. The system will be dead in 2015 and sales will come to a crawl.
