You had to have really embraced it to enjoy the system.

Miiverse, the TV pad control so your family could watch something dumb while you game'd, the incredibly lame digital download games, embracing the mockery, the really good games that gave you hope, Devil's Third in it's online meyhem prime, yup...still to lazy to fix spelling, etc.

It reminds me of what it felt like with the GameCube a bit, I was never really a big GameCube supporter and treated it like most treated the Wii U. Hated the controller, never got into many of the games and that is with me buying it twice during it's cycle.

Wii U system I give a 4, not totally blind.

But personal enjoyment, 9. I loved it and still do.

Wii U's first party catalog was actually really great, what let it down is that because it was such a flop sales wise, third party support disappeared after the first year leading to long months of nothing to play in between major releases.

This is the main advantage the Switch has, it gets plenty of third party titles to fill out the release schedule.

I would say Third parties never truly supported the Wii U.

They gave the Wii mostly trash and was still struggling since the end of the SNES on the N64 and Cube.

What did we get the first year of Wii U?

A really bad Goldeneye or James bond game, no multiplayer if I remember. Assassons creed which had already been out half a dozen times on other systems, some really bad ( can I say shovelware anymore?) And a few oher mediocre titles just to say they were there.

EA pretty much abandoned it, and that's all off the top of my head. Back to work.

While the quality of the ports was inconsistent, (due to a combination of factors like devs not being familiar with the system, games being built primarily for the PS3 and 360, and Wii U's slower CPU) it's first 12 months saw a number of big titles; Call of Duty Black Ops II and Ghosts, Batman Arkham City and Origins, Mass Effect 3, Sonic Racing Transformed, Darksiders II, Splinter Cell Blacklist, Need for Speed Most Wanted.

It had better third party support than the Switch if we compare their first year, Switch just kept getting better cos the sales justified it, while on Wii U devs shifted their resources to PS4 and Xbox One.

Yeah, this. Everyone saying WiiU failed while Switch succeeded because of 3rd-party is revising history. WiiU had early on much better 3rd-party support than Switch (except EAs unprecedented partnership). This included Ubisoft with multiple Assassin's Creed games, Splinter Cell, Rayman Legends and ZombiU. Capcom delivered Monster Hunter and Resident Evil Revelations. Square brought Arkham and Deus Ex. There was Sonic, Tekken, Call of Duty, Lego City and Darksiders II. So yeah, pretty much every big 3rd-party supported the WiiU - in contrast to the Switch.

Only after sales became clear the support for WiiU dried up while Switch support increased.

I do feel like third party support has helped the Switch, in the sense that it's a more attractive platform for the fact you can play stuff like Monster Hunter Rise, Witcher 3, Fortnite, Overwatch, Skyrim, etc on it as well as just Nintendo games, but yeah it got off the ground with hardly any help from other publishers, where Wii U had comparatively solid support at first, yet still collapsed out of the gate.

While devs did shift their resources to PS4 and Xbox One they could have still released their games on Wii U. A bunch of games came out on PS3 and Xbox 360 between 2012 and 2016, so the Wii U could have gotten those games. Someone made a video showing all games that came out for PS3 and Xbox 360 after the Wii U launched and it's shocking (not really). Over 300 games released for PS3 and Xbox 360 after 2012 did not have a Wii U version.

Wii U had third parties in the first year, but it suffered from the exact same problem as the gamecube—very few people wanted to play those games on the Wii U.

No one was saying “Hey look! It’s the same game as PS3, but I get to have prompts to take my eyes off the TV screen to look down at this gamepad thing. I love obtrusive features!”

It was literally the opposite direction of the Wii philosophy which offered games a simpler and more intuitive interface. The Wii U made the experience more complex than it had to be. That’s why games like Resident Evil 4 could not only outsell the original release, but it usurped the PS2 as the definitive way to play. That wasn’t happening with games like Monster Hunter 3 or Mass Effect on Wii U. Even what was supposed to be the Wii U’s Mario Kart 8, is mainly known as Switch games, the portability feature of the Switch made it a FAR more desirable game because now you could take the game and play a 12 player multiplayer game, and everyone got their own screen. Today, few people think of Mario Kart 8 as a Wii U game.

Ubisoft has been Nintendo's most consistent third party supporter since it began using more underpowered hardware with the Wii, and even they jumped ship as soon as they could with the Wii U. Zombie U was to the Wii U what Red Steel was to the Wii, a mature FPS at launch which showed off what makes the console unique - except it wasn't broken like that Wii game was. They kept their promise to bring Watch Dogs to the Wii U and the port when it finally came over wasn't bad. They brought over Splinter Cell as well as 2 Assassin's Creed games, Child of Light, and the Just Dance games. But even they realized the Wii U was a sinking ship which is why they delayed Rayman Legends just so they could release it at the same time on PS and XB. I actually think that was a dumb move, because if they had released it in early 2013 it would have been the only thing available for Wii U owners, whereas by releasing it so much later it had to compete with with a library which now included Super Mario 3D World and Sonic Lost World on the immediate horizon, as well as the vast libraries of the other platforms.

Trine 2 and Need for Speed Most Wanted were rare 3rd party ports where they put in the effort to take advantage of the Wii U's more powerful GPU and additional RAM to make the games look better than the PS360 counterparts. It's not that often you see EA put that much effort into anything these days.

The difference in third party support between Wii U and Switch can be seen in the fact that porting to Switch is practically an industry in and unto itself, with multiple studios like Panic Button making names for themselves specifically in porting the games of other studios to the Switch and getting them to run well. Imagine if there were studios like that for the Wii instead of developers having to have a separate team split off to make an entirely different version for the Wii.

In addition to the Gamepad, the Wii U's internal hartdware wasn't very port-friendly either; in order to maintain native backwards compatibility they took the Wii CPU, which was itself a Gamecube CPU overlocked by 50%, and made it triple instead of single core and overclocked it further to 1.2GHz.

This made ports from even PS3 and 360 harder than they needed to be, because games that were tailored to the CPUs in those consoles often didn't translate easily to the Wii U's frankenstein design.

Switch by contrast uses standardized, off-the-shelf hardware, which makes porting to it easier.