What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

[JWeinCom]

RolStoppable said:

JWeinCom said:

Obviously Super Mario Maker alone wouldn't have singlehandedly saved the Wii U. Wasn't trying to argue that, cause that'd be stupid.  The basic point I was trying to make is this.  If we could think of ways that the Wii U could have sold better (for instance Mario Maker at launch), then we can't claim that the actual sales reflected the full potential of the Wii U concept.  

Of course, the fact that a remake of NSMBU is selling better than Mario Maker 2 does throw a wrench in my logic.  Even as someone who liked NSMBU a lot that surprises me.  

As for Miyamoto, I feel that actually supports my point.  Firstly, I don't he did half bad all things considered.  Mario Maker was a decent hit.  Based on the sales bump from its launch, it contributed towards at least 100,000 Wii U sales. Which isn't bad for a single title.  And, I think it would have been more impactful if the Wii U wasn't already covered in the stench of failure.  Star Fox Zero doesn't seem to have had an impact.  But for two years one hit doesn't seem bad.  Especially since Star Fox was on a short dev cycle and was partially farmed out to another developer.

The bigger issue is this.  Miyamoto got that order in 2014?  Doesn't that kind of scream wtf to you?  Wasn't that the kind of conversation that really should have happened around 2010 at the latest?  Why didn't he have something ready (like Mario Maker) to show off the Gamepad at launch?  Shouldn't some other developers have had similar marching orders (if they did their output doesn't show it)?  

 Maybe all of Nintendo's devs could have been working their hardest to make the Gamepad an attractive concept and it still would have tanked just as bad or even worse.  But since the effort was so obviously bungled, we can't really say how much appeal the concept had.

As for the system seller and smash stuff, it makes sense in my head, but I can't quite make it make sense in writing, so I'm going to have to just concede that for now.

I hope you realize that your basic point makes you look like a Wii U apologist. So what if we can't claim that the Wii U concept reached its full sales potential when it's clear that any reasonable estimate for this hypothetical full potential would still leave the Wii U firmly in failure territory. Using your method of simple yes or no questions, could the Wii U have been a success if it had reached its full sales potential?

Miyamoto got that order in early 2014 because he convinced the board of directors that the 2012/2013 games are sufficient to sell the Wii U. After 2013 had ended with miserable sales, investors were asking about Nintendo's plan for the Wii U going forward and how they intend to communicate the value of the Gamepad, an issue that was apparent to everyone. Miyamoto was the guy who wanted the Gamepad, but it looks like he got caught off-guard when it became necessary to produce real show-off titles; turned out that he didn't have many ideas at all.

Remember, he was the general producer, that's the position within the company that makes the calls which games get greenlit and made. It's not like Miyamoto was limited by any kind of power struggle between the conception of the Wii U and the years after its launch. There absolutely was a concerted effort to make the Wii U sell. There can be discussion about the semantics of which game should released when, but if we keep the big picture in mind, no matter how we arrange the pieces of the puzzle, the result for the Wii U concept is failure. And again, this concept wasn't something totally new; it was evolved from the GC to GBA connectivity, so ideas for game design were dating back to 2002. What was put into Nintendo Land was already most of what Miyamoto and Nintendo's other developers could come up with.

Shiken said:

Seems you either forgot that the WiiU had games like...

(meaningless list)

...Or you have a completely jaded view of what the word "abandoned" means, as those games would not have been there without some kind of active support.  In fact, some would say the WiiU had better 3rd party support in its first year than the Switch did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/85fcod/the_wii_u_had_46_aaa_third_party_titles_in_its/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

I remember why the Wii U had its first software drought right after launch. It's because January/February 2013 titles like Tomb Raider and Dead Space 3 were never in the works for the Wii U; IIRC the Wii U didn't see any new retail release in January/February 2013 and that's not because there was nothing at all coming out for the PS3 and 360. You made the statement that third parties didn't really abandon the Wii U until sales dropped off, but games were already not coming to the Wii U before sales data could have any influence on decisions.

Now you could play the semantics game and say that I am wrong because abandonment requires to be somewhere in the first place, but we are both aware of the context that it's about whether or not low sales were the reason for the bad third party support the Wii U received.

In any case, you'd be better off by looking up which 2013 multiplats didn't release on the Wii U instead of looking up which ones did. The comparison to Switch has no relevance because it is about whether the Wii U's third party support was good and if low hardware sales were the neckbreaker.

No... it's not being a Wii U apologist... The whole point of this topic, and what we were discussing before you joined it, is about Monday morning quarterbacking the Wii U.  Which involves discussing exactly why it failed.  I'm not trying to argue it wasn't a failure, but I think the failure has at least as much to do with bad marketing and software support than it had to do with the appeal or lack thereof of the gamepad.  So... what you're arguing now is kind of irrelevant to what was actually being discussed.  

As for whether or not the Wii U could have been a success if the concept was better realized, I honestly can't really answer that. If you give me a criteria for what you mean by failure, I can probably give you a yes or no answer.  I don't think it would have won its generation or anything, but I think it's possible that it could have at least moved an extra ten million units or so possibly 20.

There were just so many bad decisions made about the Wii U that really had nothing to whatsoever with the Gamepad.  Not just bad decisions, just truly baffling decisions.  For instance, instead of releasing an actual sequel to Wii Sports, making a remake, not including anything from Resort, releasing it digitally only with only two games at launch, and initially offering it with a bizarre rental program.  Wii Fit U somehow being delayed while not adding much content, and again being initially launched digitally through buying a pedometer. The name, showing off only the controller at first, etc etc.  

My opinion is that the Gamepad could have been more appealing.  Unless I were to do some serious market research or invent a time machine, I can't really prove that.  What I think is a pretty obvious fact though is that the situation was fucked up in so many other ways that we can't conclude exactly what the appeal of the Gamepad was based on the overall Wii U sales.  The Gamepad was a quarterback playing behind an offensive line of geriatrics and getting sacked every play.  Maybe the quarterback does totally suck, and would still get sacked every play behind a decent line, but we can't really know.