Remember wii u is built on a low cost older fabrication process compared to PS4 and Xbox One. They use 28nm but Nintendo used 40nm for gpu and 45nm for cpu. This has kept the manufacturing cost very low. Even at this more power hungry and heat generating fabrication process the wii u produces very little heat and has a minor fan to expel that heat. A updated wii u using 28nm would be even lower in consumption, an absolutely tiny amount. The wii u can easily get smaller but that would increase manufacturing costs.
Realistically the wii u can only really become a budget console. A console bought almost exclusively for Nintendo and first party games.
As it stands Nintendo will have a lot of remaining stock of wii u consoles to shift. I think many of these new wii u bundles were simply old stock repackaged to disguise the fact that so much old stock hasn't been sold.
They predicted 9 million consoles for the year but will have sold about 2 million. There may be many millions waiting to be sold.
When they get through all this stock which could well last all this year into the next then perhaps a new sku could appear. Smaller gamepad has been my suggestion for a long time.
They should never have abandoned the wii. It still outsells the wii u in Europe. For casual games its still the best console. It was madness to abandon it so early. Let the consumers decide when it should finish.
The wii mini was a brilliant idea but the actual product was a total disaster. It needed a hdmi port for modern televisions they gave it composite output. It was cutdown into a truly awful product. A good wii mini design could have been a huge hit.
Many of the games coming out for wii u could have also come out for wii. In fact many look like they were meant to be wii titles and were simply changed to wii u at the last minute. It's utterly stupid to abandon the wii like that.
There are still tons of great games to come out for ps3 that will also be on ps4. Same is true for Xbox 360 and Xbox One. What were Nintendo thinking.
Admittedly many of the decisions Nintendo have made may not have obviously been wrong at the time but many others were utterly stupid and clearly wrong at the time.
Still saying that I never understood the success of the wii. I didn't buy one until many years after launch when they were cheap. My first wii was £45 I think. I didn't think the motion controllers were that big a deal but clearly other consumers felt otherwise.
I still believe the wii u can be saved and can be a major success this generation but it needs something Nintendo resist at every opportunity which is value in addition to many other changes. The wii u simply isn't capable of delivering true next gen performance and the outgoing ps3 and 360 are widely supported with low cost games. Nintendo have to add value. That may be downloadable wii, gamecube and N64 games at very low prices. That may be adding functionality to the wii u firmware like media centre features or blu-ray playback if possible. Perhaps be more creative with rental and resell options for downloadable games. At the moment Nintendo charges very high prices for everything and they even limit how many times you can play a playable demo. They just don't get value at all. Apple on the other hand charges huge prices for hardware but totally understands value for content. Nintendo just don't understand they need to find a value balance that makes sense to consumers.
