Did he lie?


It is just a watered down wii (not as cheap or "new"- so not appealing the casuals or a new market) but still not aimed at the traditional gaming audience. Its just a weird middle of the road machine assuming the old wii audience would jump on board and that they could expand int the core market through being slightly more capable then the 360 and having an actual gamepad.

This gives me some hope, he clocked how flawed it was early on.

Similar how? Similar in that it would be majorly underpowered compared to Sony and MS's 8th gen? Similar in not moving to x86? Similar in the same lame arsed name for the console? Similar in trying to appeal to an audience that was only ever likely to buy one console in their lifetime and try to get them to buy a second console within the space of 5 years?

Maybe he was wrong or not all was translated?

C'mon guys, you know he's right, stop wanting to be blind. That'll only hurt you at the end.

Is the Wii U a failure? The question is are they making a profit off of it. If so it's a success. I disagree with the similarity thing. The Wii and Wii U is about as different as PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. The problem was the lack of advertising. They just didn't market it nearly enough. Just look at the effort they did for Splatoon. The U should have had that kind of push. They banked on people just buying it because of the success of the Wii.

At the end of the GameCube era, Iwata said very clearly they were not in the business of making hardware so that it could sell only 20 million or so units. 

Wii U is not even going to match that, so I doubt there is a single person at Nintendo in Japan who is happy with how the Wii U turned out. 

Already starting to like him. At least he ain't stubborn.

If your product is selling less than its predecessor its a disappointment. If that product market share went from 1st to last that product is a disappointment. If that product is going to sell something around 90% less units than its predecessor that's a failure. Its not about making money. Its about making more money.  A company the size of Nintendo can't afford to sell 90% less hardware units (therefore less software) and pretend its fine just because they're making some pennies compared to what the previous systems were capable to generate in profits. It doesn't really matter how people want to spin it. Wii U is a failure.

God, it's so weird watching that now. Where to even begin? Like, who the hell at Nintendo thought the average person would think it's cool to use the freaking GamePad to make video calls when literally everyone has a smartphone that does the same and is incredibly more convenient? Also, it's crazy that they really heavily implied that a new Zelda would be coming to the Wii U at or at least soon after launch, and here we are almost three years later with no definitive timeframe for a new Zelda. Crazy. 

But more to your point, yeah, it honestly was really confusing for people to understand that the Wii U was actually a brand new console, even for avid Nintendo fans. How could they have not even shown the system itself?

The original concept they showed was a tablet-like controller. The one released it's a pitiful controller with an unused screen.