| d21lewis said: -Some people say they should have just stuck to the Wii route. I also disagree. While awesome at the time and still improved upon to this day, the motion control trend was on the decline. Nintendo couldn't have known this while developing the Wii U. Hell, Microsoft banked everything on Kinect as well. People just preferred what already worked. |
I heavily disagree on this. I love to point out for this argument the sales of Just Dance. In 2010 Nintendo scaled back casual/motion controlled games and 2011 also 3rd-parties started to reduce their games. But in these two years Just Dance peaked. The sales only started to drop, after it was clear gaming companies gave up on motion controls. So it is pretty obvious, that the motion control trend was on decline - but not because the customers went away, but because the gaming companies did. I want to point out, that the Wii was the strongest platform for Just Dance even years after discontinuation, only the Switch took the throne. A fact even Ubisoft recognizes:
"A lot of our [Just Dance series] players are children and families who continue to play on Wii." - https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/20/18662890/just-dance-2020-wii-hospitals-families-xbox-one-stadia-playstation4-nintendo-switch
This should make clear that the customers for motion controlled games never went away, they were just abandoned by the gaming companies. So a Wii successor following the motion control trend could've been at least majorly better than the WiiU. Maybe not reaching the heights of Wii, but 70-80 million should've been possible.
And I see that potential still today. A proper Wii Sports follow-up on Switch probably will sell 20M. If they evolve the concept like they did with RingFit Adventure compared to WiiFit it might even double that.
