Why did the WiiU fail?

[Soundwave]

h2ohno said:

Soundwave said:

It was decling by large degrees before 2012. 

The thing with fads is there is a decline though things will look ok, usually preceeding a very catastrophic bubble burst. You see this pattern in many fad like crazes ... see pop bands like Backstreet Boys, you usually see a decline in album to album sales and then suddenly after one album they can't sell for shit any more. 

Games like Zelda never really sold the Wii anyway ... Mario & Sonic Olympics sold the same as Twilight Princess on the Wii, lol. It was casual fare and Wii was still getting plenty of those titles like 18 Just Dance games a year, Zumba Fitness, Wii Party, Mario Party, uDraw, etc. etc. etc. 

There should not have been a decline at all just because Nintendo wasn't releasing like Metroid Prime 4 for Wii or something. 

We see the same thing with Kinect too ... Kinect was red hot for MS even through 2011, 2012 you see some troubling signs for it, by 2013 the craze is dead. 

I think a Wii 2 maybe would've sold like 25-28 million units ... better than the Wii U sure, but not a huge success. When people got sick of mini-game-a-thons, the whole Wii concept becomes pretty bankrupt. 

Declining sales when were on the market for 5 years already, had rediculously astronomical sales for most of that time, had already come close to 100 million units sold, and were now seeing major reductions in both hardware and software development, does not signal a bubble burst.  There is no counterfactual to test that the crowd that loved Wii Sports would not have bought a Wii 2 bulndled with a copy of Wii Sports hd.  Again, the Wii still sold 500,000 units on Black Friday 2011 and was outselling its successor through much of 2013 despite a severe lack of production of both consoles and games.  Demand was clearly there despite the console seeming to have reached market saturation.

In my opinion a Wii 2, with clear marketing and either being $100 cheaper or significantly more powerful than the Wii U, maybe a combination of greater power and $50 cheaper, would have outsold the XBOX 1 and that it would have taken the PS4 about 3 years to catch up to and overtake it.  I believe a Wii 2 would currently be sitting at around 50 million units sold after 4.5 years on the market and would now be beginning to see its own declines.

The problem is fundamentally the Wii was already a sinking ship that had hit its iceberg. 

It had dropped from 20 million yearly shipments to sub 10 million even before the Wii U launched, and I think it was destined to keep going lower and lower.

The Wii as a brand was too tied centrally to the concept of mini-game collections, when the bubble for that style of gaming burst, the brand itself was devalued to basically nothing almost overnight. 

So that's kind of the elephant in the room ... a "powerful" Wii in a way is a contradiction in terms because people associated the Wii with low end graphics and "fun for grandpa" experiences. I remember one of my friends had a Wii and I told him the Fatal Frame series was coming to Wii (a series I knew he enjoyed from the XBox days) and he paused and asked "can the Wii run Fatal Frame?" and I remember just being aghast and told him "of course it can".

Either way, the brand had become a toxic liability for Nintendo by 2011, as fads tend to do. It's not an issue of pricing, it was of perception. The Wii's whole schtick/gimmick was being the casual console brand, when casual home console games went out of style, the entire Wii brand was fucked no matter what. It's like an actress who's built her career on being young/beautiful but not so much on actually being able to act ... she's kinda screwed when her looks go even if she tries hard to "rebrand" herself.