Wii U Turns 10 TODAY!

[h2ohno]

The Wii U is fascinating because of how Nintendo got everything wrong it possibly could have. I can see Nintendo executives living out that scene from The Producers: 'We picked the wrong name, the wrong hardware specs, the wrong controller, the wrong marketing, the wrong games, WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT?' It was overpriced and underpowered, the games it should have launched with to sell it launched almost 3 years too late, most people didn't even know what it was, and those who did didn't care. The gamepad was innovation for innovation's sake without any mass appeal or reason for existing.

The Wii U should have been a Wii 2 with much better specs than it actually had. There was no need whatsoever to reinvent the wheel again, and all it did was confuse people and raise the price of the system. If it had the specs of a docked Switch and was as easy to port to as the Switch is its early third party support wouldn't have looked like inferior versions of old 360 games that ran worse on the newer hardware than they did on 7-year-old hardware. The Wii itself would have sold more consoles from 2012-2017 than the Wii U did if Nintendo had decided to keep supporting it instead of making a new system. It was outselling the Wii U for much of 2013. A Wii 2 that launched at $300, had specs that justified that price, and simply reused the Wiimote plus as the primary controller, would have sold many times more than the Wii U. I think it would have sold somewhere between the NES and the 3DS, which while nowhere near Wii or Switch numbers, still would have been the second-best any Nintendo home console had ever sold.

The games are both the system's saving grace and another reason it failed. The library is fantastic, even with many of the best now ported to the Switch. But it's mostly a library of supporting games. The games you buy a system for didn't start coming until 2014 with Mario Kart 8, and then Mario Maker the following year. Super Mario 3D World is as good as any Mario game, but it doesn't capture the imagination at a glance the way Mario 64, Galaxy, and Odyssey do, and the system desperately needed a game which could do that. Mario Maker was that game, but by that point it was far too late. Smash 4 also lacked personality when compared to all other games in the series. The core gameplay and roster were arguably better than ever, but it was just 'Smash for Wii U' and with Ultimate out it's far easier to forget than Melee or Brawl. The system's failure led to a ton of unique games we might not otherwise have gotten like Captain Toad and Hyrule Warriors, but again, those are supporting games and not reasons to buy the console.