The Switch is not another Wii U!

[bdbdbd]

Trunkin said:

I'd argue that, if consoles were truly important to Nintendo, they would have found the money to do something to save it. After all, they had a ton of cash after the run-away success of the Wii and DS. Their investors would just have to accept the temporary losses -- unless they thought the idea itself was so terrible that it could not be salvaged, which would make me ask how the concept ever got off the ground in the first place.

I think the Wii U could have sold much better if they'd taken action early on by cutting by immediately cutting $100 off its asking price, removing the built-in gamepad, investing heavily in first/second party games, and paying third parties to bring games to their platform. No way would it ever sell PS4 numbers, but I bet it would have sold a bare minimum of 2x as much as it did.

Well, there's that Nintendo had basically two consoles to save, 3DS and Wii U. It's pretty obvious that even if they'd been willing to spend the money trying to save both of the devices, Nintendo's development resources could not keep up. I think this is what woke Nintendo up to unify their development resources.

Why they coudn't just ditch the gamepad, I could see two reasons: the time Nintendo figured out Wii U isn't going to pick up steam, they already had locked themselves with the software to the gamepad, and also that manufacturing contracts Nintendo had, extended so far into Wii U's life with the sales rate it had, that it hadn't save money, and it had not been sensible to ditch at that point anymore.