| curl-6 said: It failed because where the Wii removed barriers to entry for gaming, the Wii U added them. The Wiimote made gaming simple, accessible, and fun. The Wii U Gamepad made it cumbersome and convoluted. It was a gimmick nobody asked for, it added to the price of the system, and the fact only one was supported per console complicated multiplayer. |
Agreed.
A good way to think about this is to reverse the question and ask what would have made the WiiU a success:
1. Would have needed a big critically acclaimed launch game that got people dying to buy the system: Nintendo always needs to launch with either 3D Mario or 3D Zelda, and potentially an additional casual game that set consumers ablaze with word of mouth like Wii Sports did.
2. Cheaper price, should have been $250/$300 not $300/$350. Wii was $250, WiiU was $350 for the one with halfway decent storage. Consumers expect Nintendo systems to be affordable so suddenly jumping up the price by 40% was an awful move.
3. Keep the hits coming. A must-own launch Zelda/Mario and optionally also a Wii Sports-like hit would have put it off to a great start but then you still need more hits coming soon after. WiiU didn't have that.
4. A completely different design. This is the main thing of course. Even with a cheaper price, a must-own launch game or two, and regular releases of great Nintendo games, it was still a horrible design that nobody asked for. As Curl said, Wii made gaming accessible and fun and social for gamers and non-gamers alike, while WiiU's design did pretty much the exact opposite. All of a sudden instead of a super simple fun multiplayer experience like the Wii created, you have an awkward one-player focused system with the other people seeming like secondary players. That sort of asynchronous multiplayer gameplay can be interesting for very specific games! But not for the basis of an entire system! Forcing the entire system to mold games to something that would only work for a small handful of game types was just a monumental blunder by Nintendo.
When they announced the WiiU my reaction was something along the lines of:
"that's kind of cool you can take the gamepad away from the TV and keep playing your game, could be useful in some family households, but that's not a system selling feature and for probably most people including myself is of very little interest, and wtf is up with only one giant expensive controller and everyone else in multiplayer games awkwardly not getting to play with the system's controller and having to use last-gen controllers??!"
So basically, no matter what you change with the WiiU's pricing/launch/software, the only thing that would have made it a success is if it wasn't a WiiU!
You can tell what they were trying to do with the WiiU - a halfway effort to what they actually made with the Switch. But it's like they decided on this strategy, and once they decided on it they never once questioned if it was actually a good design and if people would actually want to play it. Not to mention the fact that by the time the WiiU came out the excitement over the Wii had completely died as sales at the 3-4 year mark went from on fire to plummeting. So they brought out a very poorly designed system that was supposed to leverage the Wii to continue the Wii's momentum, but it launched like 2-3 years after all the momentum had faded from the Wii.
It seems like they didn't bother to do any market research about their idea, cuz you gotta figure if they did they would have heard a lot of statements similar to my own initial thoughts I mentioned above.
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