Nuvendil said:
It comes down to system marketing. The PlayStation 4 has been very well promoted. The Wii U on the other hand is inconsistently bouncing back and forth between good marketing, mediocre marketing, and then no marketing. 2013 was almost complete radio silence until the notoriously awful late 2013 campaign. Then silence again until the good MK8 campaign and then silence again until the modest efforts with Bayo 2 and Hyrule Warriors and the prolific but inconsistent quality push for Smash. Then - you guessed it - almost complete silence until Splatoon. Followed by...I think you get it. Focusing advertising around exclusives sounds like a way to promote without torching mountains of money but Nintendo's execution means that they have never, ever built up sustained hype in the general buying public. Yes, the informed buying public is knowledgeable enough but the general has to be told. The majority of consumers don't frequent review sites and forums. |
The general consumers wants to play Call of Duty and Destiny and FIFA and Madden and Fallout and Star Wars Battlefront and Far Cry and Grand Theft Auto and the Wii U does not have the next-gen versions of those IP.
It's like telling a person you run a theater chain but you don't have Deadpool or Star Wars or Zootophia or Avengers or Jurassic World or Furious 7 or Inside Out playing but you have some even better reviewed indie film and/or foreign films playing at your theater. You likely are not going to get a mass crowd.
It was also the same thing with the Sega Master System back in the day ... the Sega Master System had some wonderful exclusives ... Afterburner, Out Run, Alex Kid, Phantasy Star, Shinobi, etc. hell a lot of these were better than what the NES had, but the NES had every third party game and a selection of thousands of games ranging from Ice Hockey to Ninja Turtles to Punch-Out to Final Fantasy to Ninja Gaiden to Contra on top of Super Mario Bros.
Having a handful of great games has never been enough in this business, people want a large variety of different types of games. Generally speaking this is impossible without third party support.
The other problem is Nintendo's exclusives largely appeal to the same audience over and over again. It's not like Smash, Splatoon, Mario 3D, Mario Kart have dramatically different audiences.
