RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:
Well for one, Nintendo designed the Wii U with the assumption that many people already had Wiimotes in their home, so why not give them a new type of controller to go with that? I think that was their thinking (rightly or wrongly). The Wii U controller really isn't that much different from a 3DS or DS, yes it has analog sticks and maybe that's confusing to some gamers, but it also has a giant touch panel that is arguably even more intuitive for many players than finnicky motion controllers can be (try to get a true casual to play Skyward Sword and see how long they last).
I think the design hope for the Wii U was always to create a slightly more balanced system than the Wii, they didn't want a system that people basically just played Wii Sports on. They still wanted the Wii Sports crowd, their ambition though was just to nudge those people to maybe try different types of games.
Maybe not unlike the DS' success in Japan ... where sure it sold a ton of casual titles like Nintendogs and Brain Training, but it actually had some good success with things like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and other more "core" IP too. I think that was Nintendo's idea to maybe bring more of that to the Wii. Not to compete directly with Sony/MS though, looking at the system specs for 5 seconds makes it fairly obvious it was never intended to compete in that way.
I think perhaps EA thought they could get Nintendo to use Origin, that was the only reason they were on that stage, in no way is the Wii U the system that EA would design, and you know that full well. Of the three current consoles it's the furthest thing from the system EA would design actually.
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Right, give people a new type of controller that is a lot like the old one that already got rejected. Your reasoning also requires that Nintendo would have made games to sell that controller (because why make it, if not for games?), but a good 18 months after launch we know that that wasn't the case. And Miyamoto's attempts to fix that "oversight" that were shown at this year's E3 make it pretty clear that the Gamepad wasn't designed with any good game ideas in mind.
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Don't shoot the messenger, the tablet pad isn't the controller I'd bank a system on, I'm just looking at it from Nintendo's POV. I also probably think that they came up with the idea for it before Apple released the iPad in spring 2010, and if everyone and their grandma didn't already have a tablet in the house, some of what the Wii U tablet brings to the table may have been fairly novel. They probably also saw the inital success of uDraw on the Wii.
But as is, put next to "real" tablet, it looks like some cheap kids toy with limited functionality and that certainly isn't helping Nintendo.
Some of the things are neat though like the ability to share funny Youtube videos on the TV with family/friends ... in a world where an iPad doesn't exist, something like that might be much more of a notable functionality.
Though I think this whole situation illustrates pretty clearly the dangers of trying to rely on controller gimmicks to sell a console. Sometimes it works, but if it doesn't, you've basically put all your eggs in one basket and now you're screwed.
