| GProgrammer said: There were perhaps 5 people on the planet that actually thought the Wii U was an accessory to the Wii. |
Agreed, I find it funny people still try to put the Wii U's failure down to some ridiculous idea that nobody could tell if it was a new system or an add-on to the Wii. Really? A $350 add-on that includes brand new hardware? I don't think so.
The Wii U's problem was partially that the Wii's popularity was heavily based on non-gamers who had picked up tens of millions of Wii's in the Wii frenzy from 2007 to 2009. Being non-gamers, they lost interest after a couple years, or just continued to play the handful of games they liked playing on the Wii. It wasn't an audience that was easily brought over to a new system, because it isn't a gaming audience and the fact that the Wii got these people in the first place is pretty incredible and just shows how much of a phenomenon the Wii was to the general non-gaming market.
The Wii U's other problem was that they didn't have a Wii Sports-like game to continue the Wii revolution on the Wii U. Wii Sports is literally what sold tens of millions of Wii's to non-gamers. Wii U had nothing with that sort of word of mouth viral popularity. And it probably wasn't possibly to repeat that because Wii Sports had the novelty of motion control being brand new, while playing on a tablet or having a second screen was not some amazing new concept.
Finally the Wii U's gamepad was just not an interesting feature and Nintendo built the entire viability of the Wii U around it. It created an awkward forced asymmetric play style for all multiplayer games, and for single player games resulted in having to play with an awkward huge ass controller. The upshot that you could play while someone else is using the TV did not make up for those two things. Basically the tablet was too expensive and not necessary to have 4 of, so you only can use one on a system. Whole thing was just poorly thought out and they focused on coming up with a new gimmick instead of coming up with a good way to play games.
I somewhat agree with people who say the Wii U was a necessary failure because it truly was the halfway point between the Wii and the Switch, and the Switch probably wasn't viable in 2012 (it would have been too low powered compared to other systems hitting the market so instead of offering console experiences on the go it would've felt more like just the latest handheld generation, like maybe it would have been on the level of Wii graphics but in HD). So yeah if Nintendo wouldn't have come up with the concept of the Switch without making that halfway step of the Wii U and failing and realizing they needed to go all the way then it was a necessary failed step.
But I'm not sure if that is even the case - if that failure was needed to guide Nintendo to the Switch. If not, I would say a straight generational upgrade to the Wii is what the Wii U should have been, though now that I think about it, given what I said above about it being very hard to bring those non-gamers to a new system, I'm not sure that a straight upgrade to the Wii would have succeeded either. Although I guess if Nintendo had made it nearly as powerful as the PS4 and One it would have probably gotten decent 3rd party support and so that plus motion control games may have resulted in at least decent sales, maybe XboxOne level sales.
Yeah so after thinking about it I'm gonna say the Wii U failure is fine because who knows how successful a straight generational upgrade to the Wii would have been and Wii U did lead to Switch and now we are all happy with Nintendo and its future possibilities.
