What if the next Nintendo console is not the "Switch 2"?

[h2ohno]

Nintendo should never pursue innovation purely for innovation's sake again.

If they had released a 'Wii 2' that kept or slightly upgraded the Wiimote instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again with the gamepad then the system would have sold multiple times what the Wii U did. The original Wii was outselling the Wii U for much of 2013 despite being abandoned and replaced by Nintendo, so it wasn't the Wii brand that was the problem. The Wii U was so unappealing that Nintendo would have been better off just continuing to make Wii games and selling Wiis instead of making the Wii U. They'd have sold more Wiis from 2012-2017 than they did Wii U's in that period if they kept supporting and producing the Wii. I doubt a true Wii 2 would have sold 100 million like the Wii, but I could see it selling anywhere from SNES numbers to 3DS numbers.

Nintendo is in a similar situation now to where it was in the Wii era, and if they try to reinvent the wheel again they will be making the same mistake all over again. The Switch as a concept and brand could be as stable and popular as Playstation is and the Gameboy brand used to be before the DS prematurely killed off the GBA. It could be a line of systems that sells 100 million consoles every generation as long as Nintendo doesn't screw it up. The end of the motion control boom meant that the Wii brand didn't have that kind of potential even if its successors could still have outsold the NES, but the Switch can do it if Nintendo doesn't muck it up like they did with the Wii U. They could lose many tens of millions of console sales by introducing a bad innovation like they did with the gamepad.