Like the title asks, why do people act like WiiU is following the exact same strategy the Wii followed? I see this mostly from Sony fans, seemingly to explain away the Wii U's sales troubles. Their analysis is that Nintendo followed the EXACT same plan they did with the Wii but they failed because a bunch of people called "the casuals" have left the market, and are fine now with phone and tablet games.
Now, reading another thread*, I saw some guy who has nailed the question in one simple sentence:
Nintendo came up with the WiiU beacuse they couldn't come up with a better idea.
True. That's the main difference with the Wii.
The Wii had a philosophy or a direction, the WiiU hasn't got any or, if ever, it's a very incoerent one.
I'll break this down by hardware proposal, software proposal, and price.
Wii -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wii was meant to attract new gamers, thanks to intuitive and simplified controls combined with "pick-up and play" gameplay schemes.
Wii Sports, Wii's main killer app, wasn't tring to make anything new in the gaming "universe", it was just a sports compliation. Really, what is more unoriginal than sports, in gaming? We had those since Pong. Also, Wiisports was self-explanatory. It was able to attract new players beacuse people didn't have to learn how to play. On the other hand they were trying to retain experienced players, in fact a new Zelda game was avaliable on launch.
The price. The Wii was the cheaper console avaliable at the time of release by a good margin (250 vs 400, not to mention Ps3), also it was the only one to bundle game with it. Clearly it had an aggressive price. The previous generation was ended, XB and GC were basically dead, Ps2 was still supported but didn't have any major release programmed fot it.
WiiU -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Was the WiiU meant to attract new gamers? How? The controller is not something intuitive at all it is a bigger mainstream controller with a touch screen attached on it. Not only it's not intuitive, it's more complicated than a standard controller.
NintendoLand, the game Nintendo bundled with it, was actually trying to make something innovative in the gaming "universe": asymmetrical gameplay, something umprecedented in console gaming. NintendoLand isn't self-explanatory, on the contrary it is an explenation (and quite blatantly, look at cover: a WiiU controller and Monita - the annoying guy who explain things -) it's meant to teach you how to use the controller and to showcase the possibities of asymmetrical gameplay. This time Nintendo did nothing to attract experienced players; they gave the task to Ubisoft who naturally came up with a mediocre game, ZombiU.
The price. Was the WiiU the cheapest console avaliable by time of release? No. On the contrary it was the most expansive. And yes, I'm confronting it to old gen systems. Why? Beacuse last year X360 and Ps3 weren't dead at all (they aren't dead yet, right now), on the contrary 2013 was one of the biggest years for those platforms, expecially Ps3 (GOW Ascension, TLOU, Beyond, GTAV, etc.).
(any reference to other posts or threads is purely coincidental)
