| RolStoppable said: The GC to GBA connectivity as well as the Gamepad fall into the category of Miyamoto enjoying it to create products that are more toy than game. In hindsight it's undeniable that Miyamoto had not enough good ideas to justify the Gamepad's existence. It was a controller that was put out in hopes that other developers would figure out something great to do with it. It wasn't unlike "games" like Wii Music or the Japan-exclusive Mario Artist series where it was up to the imagination of others (in this case, consumers) to make something worthwhile out of the product. |
This hits on a valid point, in my opinion.
The reality is that Nintendo had basically no idea what to do with the Gamepad. The Wii had a killer app like Wii-Sports to fully show consumers and developers what the Wii could do, but this was completely missing from the Wii U. Miyamoto's vision of the Wii U could be summarized with Star Fox Zero which was a confusing mess and which ultimately didn't utilize the gamepad well either. It wasn't until Super Mario Maker came out that Nintendo finally found a legitimately unique and useful application of the Gamepad that couldn't be replicated on other consoles. If SMM had been a launch title it could have at least given developers an idea of where to go with the Wii U that was unique and cool, but it probably wouldn't have changed the consoles fate very much as it is still a very limited application.
Honestly, I wish that Nintendo did just go with a re-launch of a Gamecube style console instead of the Wii U. In fact, the Gamecube was a very technically impressive console for its day and was probably even beyond what the Wii U needed to be hardware-wise. The fact is that Nintendo needed to learn how to develop HD games and thanks to the Wii they were about 6 years behind the competition. The Wii U generation had to be a catch-up generation for Nintendo no matter what the company did and Nintendo was right to make it a shorter generation. That being said, I probably would have opted for releasing a console maybe 50% faster than the PS3 in terms of power and then just go with a traditional controller, just like the Gamecube had done. Development costs could have been a lot lower and Nintendo could have ratcheted prices down to $100 like they did with the Gamecube which could have probably gotten the Wii U over the 20M mark. It would not have been a highly successful console but it could have been much less of a disaster than the Wii U turned out to be.
