Looking back at why the Wii U failed

[JWeinCom]

There's a lot of reasons, but I think the one that is overlooked is just how bad the games lineup was.

It launched with NSMBU as its big title, and that was a fun but pretty safe sequel. Then, there was kind of nothing major for about a year. Not only did the library fail to take advantage of the hardware, but for the most part, they weren't very exciting titles. They're fine games for the most part, which is why they're selling on the Switch, but very few system sellers. You likely already had similar experiences on the Wii or 3DS, so it was hard to justify buying a Wii U, particularly with its other flaws. There were also some straight up bizarre choices made, like whatever the fuck they were doing with Wii Sports Club. While releasing a (very good) version of Smash on 3DS was great for gamers, not so much for selling Wii Us.

The Wii U evendually did get some genuinely good and novel games, like Mario Maker, Splatoon, and Breath of the Wild, and the first two at least actually sort of showed why the Gamepad was a good idea. I still wish I could use the gamepad for Splatoon 3 and Mario Maker 2. But by the time those kinds of games came out, it was too late.

I would love to see an alternate past where the Wii U's launch title was more like the Switch. Like, BOTW and Mario Kart 8 were available at launch, and the first year had Pokken, Mario Maker, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and Splatoon. I wonder if that would have been enough to kind of salvage the Wii U and have it sell at like XBox One levels. Sadly the world will never know.

I still think there's something to the asynchronous dual screen set up. I wouldn't be shocked if it's something that the Switch 2 could do. Nintendo does like to try and rejigger their failed ideas, and sometimes it works out.