I'm curious how many "good" games the Wii U will have in 2014. We all know that Smash Bros and Mario Kart will get good reviews, but counting quantity over quality, how many games will get "green" Metascores this year in total?

Personally, in terms of sheer number of games, I expect the Wii U to top 2012 and 2013, perhaps combined (although the high number of well received launch ports makes this difficult). Why? Well, look at the Wii's number of "Green" games by year through 2008:

• 2006: 6
• 2007: 19
• 2008: 42

The Wii, even though the latter half of 2008 is poorly remembered, reached a high point in 2008. This was thanks largely to WiiWare, but there is a parallel with the upcoming flood of Wii U eShop games, particularly from indie developers that only recently began making Nintendo games.

Let's look at the number of "Green" Wii U games by yeare so far:

• 2012: 18 (The launch ports were plentiful and well received)
• 2013: 29 (Surprisingly, a better year than 2007, at least according to this scale)
• 2014: 1 (Hi Tropical Freeze)

Admittedly, the first two months of the year have not been kind to the Wii U. However, the Wii U is due to receive dozens of eShop games this year. If a quarter of them are good, that's about 15 "Green" games. Then, we add the few surefire hits under the Nintendo banner, such as Smash Bros, Mario Kart, and Bayonetta, which is another, say, five games. Last, we throw in every non-Nintendo 3rd party retail game this year, both exclusive and multiplatform. This will include likely sucessful games like Skylanders 4, Watch Dogs, LEGO titles, etc. Even with fairly modest estimates, this should all add up to around the same amount of "Green" games we had in 2013, about 30 or so. If more eShop games are announced or another few retail games are announced, 2014 can likely do somewhat better than 2013. Though I admit, the 48 needed to out-quality 2012 and 2013 combined would be tough.

What do you think? Will the Wii U have a decent number of critical hits this year?

What about 12?

That doesn't sound like very many to me. For comparison's sake, the Wii had 15 in 2011, a notoriously bad year for it.

Why do you think the Wii U will only have 11 such games for the rest of the year?

Critics are more harsh nowadays than ever. On top of that, WiiU tends to get the gimped version of multiplatform releases - if it gets a release -, and critics out of randomness tends to score the WiiU version worse. Hence if we're judging things over Meta, I don't see it making it past twelve, but I could be wrong.

You mention indie games, but outside exclusive ones for the WiiU, indies hardly ever get reviewed on the WiiU version, making Metacritic for such console moot. And just because a game is indie doesn't mean it has to score great, so developers really have to step up against adversity.

Critical hits are defined by an +75 score? I have no idea how many Wii U will have I hope many it needs it.

if you are counting digital only titles it should be fairly high (assuming they all get reviewed)...I'd say 20-30? I dunno...I'm just pulling numbers out of nowhere

A lot of indie titles should support it the number overall.

The more important question is; will it matter at all in the long run? My guess is no.

In a broad sense, probably not. But as a gamer, I like playing good games, and this "75+ Metascore" scale is an easy, if flawed, way of gauging the number of fun games there will be to play.

Besides, eventually everybody will die and the universe will end, so of course it doesn't matter in the long run. But now that we've determined that most things aren't that important, it's interesting to see what we can find in the relatively trivial.

I guess the definition of "hit" is a bit vague. I'm using 75+ Metascore as a sort of placeholder for an objective way of measuring this sort of thing.