colafitte said:
Wii just lasted like a normal "failure" Nintendo console lifespan but it definitively did not lasted selling well as long as NES, SNES or DS, and it seems it won't last as long as Switch either. In its 6th year, Wii was selling almost 4x less than just 3 years before. NES, SNES, DS, PS, PS2, X360, PS3, PS4, all lasted more than 6 years, and they were not selling 4x less in its 6th year compared to its 3rd....That was unprecedented in a console that sold as well as Wii in its first few years. Every time you see a graphic showing sales of different consoles you can see how Wii drops in sales way more heavily than any other comparable console. Despite N64 being considered a failure compared to PS1, Nintendo went from selling 49M with SNES to 33M with N64 and to 22M with GC. With Wii they went from 102M to barely 15M. There's a reason why 2012-2016 are one of the least succesfully financial years for Nintendo in its history, and it wasn't because they started suddenly making bad games during those years (in fact it started their most creative years since N64 era). It's because Wii wasn't able to transfer their success into the future. I'm pretty sure more people are going to be hyped by the Switch successor than they were for the Wii back then. And to explain my point, i was referring to motion controls as the use of nunchuks in Nintendo games. You don't have to play anymore Mario 3D games, Zelda games, ...only with just that technology. Nintendo backtracked and offered conventional gameplay as its main way to play the games. Yes, there's still motion control features (optional if you want), but you basically play most Switch games in conventional ways again and the most prefered way to play those games is with a classic pad style. Wii main characteristic was its Nunchuk controls. In 2006 it seemed this was going to be the next way of how to play videogames, but here we are in 2019 and people prefer a conventional pad again. I will bet my money, that most people prefer now playing their Nintendo games with a pad than with those nunchuks. That was the "fad" part of my point, the games in itself were not a fad, they were great in fact. |
Wii sales dropped off because Nintendo abandoned it early in order to move their teams onto 3DS and Wii U. They simply continued their standard 5 year console strategy, while the increasing demands of supporting two platform lines with increasing game complexity (3DS and the HD Wii U) soaked up all of their development resources and starved the Wii of getting end-of-life support. When the games stopped, naturally sales slowed.
And Wii U failed on its own terms, that has no more to do with Wii than PS3's massive drop in sales and loss of market leader position has to do with PS2. Nintendo made basically every possible wrong decision in the years from 2012-2016, that is why they sold poorly during that time. As we have seen with the Switch now selling like crack, gamers buy (or don't buy) platforms on their own merits, not based on their predecessors.
As for claims that motion controls were a "fad", a fad is something that is wildly popular for a very short time then disappears overnight. Motion controls didn't disappear, they're still here more than 12 years after the Wii came out, hence they don't fit the definition of a fad.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 06 May 2019
