| awesomeabe1998 said: With the release of Super Smash Bros. U in the US the Wii U's weekly amount of units sold globally is at 149k the week ending November 22 and SBBU sold 481k in the span of two days globally. Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic and the fastest selling Wii U game to date. With all the news about how it is selling like crazy in Europe is great as well and I'm pretty sure it will sell well in Japan. I project global sales to be at around 1 million next week and I predict Wii U to be at around 450k units sold next week but is that enough? When you have the XB1 selling better than the Wii U when SSBU comes out worldwide that is not a good sign. The Wii U is struggling but not like how the Dreamcast struggled. The Dreamcast had no support from Sega but the Wii U has support from Ninty. Or does it? My point from all this is just explaining how Nintendo should deal with the mess the Wii U caused. Yes Nintendo has yet to reveal Amiibo numbers but what else do they have? They have top quality games but they need to attract third parties, buy other companies,outsource their IPs and simply sell more units. Attracting third parties is a hard one but acquisitions aren't. They have a decent amount of money. Enough to buy companies like Capcom or Ubisoft. They can outsource their IP's to companies like Platinum Games or Namco. They need to advertise more. So I have two questions: 1) Why are more people buying PS4 and XB1? 2) What do you think Nintendo could do to turn this thing around? EDIT: I had Wii U at 200k units for next week but I forgot about Black Friday so I changed it to 450k |
To answer your questions:
The reason people are buying either system is because it's clear that both of those systems are technically more capable, both are easier to develop for, offer much more resources for developers, they also come packed with far bigger hard drives as standard, they have major 3rd party support and both offer better online features.
The online is about the only factor that can be improved as far as the benefits both PS4 and Xbox One have over the Wii U, without building a new console or updating the Wii U's hardware. Nintendo are stuck with the platform they have as far as CPU, GPU and RAM goes, they could offer a free HDD and a USB cable with all Wii Us going forward. They can drop the price of the Wii U, get rid of the 8GB model and say offer the 32GB model for much closer to the price of the 8GB system. Make a model of the Wii U with better storage capacity or even a model with a built in bigger HDD.
Nintendo needs to offer a more diverse line-up of games that people can't get on PS4 or XBox One. If they can't handle the workload internally then create better relationships with external studios and have them work on a set of new IPs. Nintendo doesn't have many mature action games, nothing like Uncharted, God of War, Gears, they miss out on the likes of Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Bioshock, so they need to make games like those, to cater to that crowd of gamers, only unique to Nintendo, so they can claw that audience back to their platforms. They loose on all of the sporting franchises on a regular basis, they don't have anything like Gran Turismo or Forza.
Nintendo's line-up is always to the extremes, either deeply family oriented, very casual or extreme mature, there's very little the fits in between. It all takes itself too seriously IMO, which is fine for the audience that buys Nintendo's systems, but it doesn't let Nintendo branch out.
Major hits take too long too be released, so Nintendo has very little to fill those gaps in the line-up when they need those kinds of games. Nintendo has a lot of IPs they should also milk more on their home consoles, like Pilot Wings, Star Fox, Metroid and F-Zero. They've never done a home console version of a huge open world Pokemon game, even though it's clear it would sell like hot cakes.
There's such great potential in a Kingdom Hearts style Nintendo universe game, especially with Amiibo now.
As a side point I never understood why Nintendo never tried to make a load of movies based around their major franchises, a Zelda film, made in a similar style to Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings would be awesome, a CG mario movie, Live Action Metroid film. Hell Nintendo could have been as big as Disney if they had tied a movie studio into the company and maybe built a theme park, holiday resort. These kinds of business decisions would only serve to boster the game business because the audience would be much larger as a result and way more Nintendo home consoles or hardware in general would sell.
Nintendo has missed so many opportunities that are clear too me. They could still make such things become a reality and expand the business gradually, by creating a few new IPs this gen, the likes of Splatoon are a start, but Nintendo needs to do more in the way of their game line-up to fill the gap they're missing.
They need to start listening to the wider gaming community, maybe run a survey to anyone will to comment and actually take that feedback to heart.
