Opinion: Wii U’s Failure Had Little To Do With The Gamepad.

[h2ohno]

The problem for third parties wasn't the gamepad. It was a combination of a ridiculously weak CPU that made ports of the CPU-heavy 360 and PS3 games often run worse than 6 and 7-year-old consoles, and a lack of effort to play to the strengths of the GPU or having significantly more usable RAM than the previous gen consoles. Need For Speed Most Wanted is one of the few third party games where that effort was put in, and it had significantly better textures than the other console versions as a result, but that kind of effort was rare. A CPU that didn't struggle with 360 ports would have made a big difference in the initial launch period and could have kept third parties around longer. The launch tarred the Wii U with the reputation as the place where third party games don't run well, so they didn't sell, and the third parties quickly left.

The gamepad was a problem for Nintendo, because they needlessly added a new hurdle into the development process right at the worst possible time - when they were finally making the transition to HD development. The last thing they needed was another factor making development take even longer than their first HD games were already taking, either because the needed to take more time to come up with ideas for how to use the gamepad or to implement those ideas. That is how the gamepad contributed to those software droughts.

The 2 big problems with the gamepad were the price and how Nintendo's focus on it caused a lot of people to think the Wii U was just a tablet add-on to the Wii. People won't buy a console if your marketing is so bad they don't even know there is a console in the first place. And even among those who did know, a tablet would never have the same appeal as something like the Wii's motion controls. A 'Wii 2,' even with the same specs, would have sold several times more than the Wii U, and if the resources wasted on the gamepad went into making the system more powerful instead, those sales would have increased even further.