The Wii U was notoriously ill conceived from a hardware perspective. Its Gamepad controller and internals similar in power to the previous generation failed to capture the market's interest, resulting in very poor sales.

Obviously, the path they took was the wrong one. But what if they'd taken a different path?

Let's imagine for a moment that instead of the historical Wii U, Nintendo releases a standard home console in 2013, on par with PS4 in power. It costs $400 USD, and instead of the Gamepad, it uses the Wii U Pro controller as its primary controller. It is compatible with the Wii mote as well like the real Wii U was.

Nintendo's first party games stay as is, albeit with graphics of PS4 quality, and with Gamepad centric stuff like Nintendoland reworked as more standard fare.

In this scenario, how do you think the 8th gen plays out for Nintendo?

It probably doesn't sell much better and Nintendo loses even more money. It wasn't just the hardware. It was also Nintendo in their approach to 3rd parties was just ancient. With Switch, they changed their entire approach and hired networked people. The man currently in charge of NOA third parties is well-networked and you can bet he's the one who got Overwatch on Switch. A bunch of Western games and convinced Iron Galaxy to work with Retro (his best friends work there). Switch isn't very powerful either but the affordability of the dev kit. Easy to use dev tools and better third-party relations. Better marketing (Wii U marketing was trash and that guy is long gone) and the Wii U name and boxes looking like Wii cases didn't help. Keeping the Wii name was another dagger. Hardware was only one part of the problem.

Here are a few reasons I think the WiiU failed as a gen 8 console

• Marketing
• Little to no 3rd Party
• Couldn't appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers
• Less Power than competition
• No Internal Hard Drive Storage

Here's how we can make the WiiU a more viable 8th gen.

• Market the WiiU as a different name (Wii 2 could work, but knowing Nintendo they'd call it something else for they don't like number scheme)
• Have the power of the WiiU be either similar, on par, or in range of the PS4, and Xbox One
• Get recognition and real support from the big 3rd party developers

Honestly, I think with that alone the WiiU could have been a viable competitor for another 2 years so 2019 (6 year life cycle), giving the Switch an extra 2 years to polish and release in Nov 2019 with stock ready and shipped before the pandemic.

Given that Nintendo looks for more fun, I dont think they would've made a console to be on par with PS4 and Xbox One in terms of power. Given that they wouldn't be able to get the recognition and real support from all the 3rd party developers, but I can see them at least getting the smaller developers, and more indie (like how Switch is doing so now). Allowing them to last another 2 years as well.

This is a fun, speculation thread. I love it. And can't wait to see what more people say.

While I will admit it was best the Wii U died out the way it did, because we wouldn't have the Switch, I still think the Wii U wouldn't have fared as well against the PS4.

While the Wii U certainly had quite a few great games, there would be times where first-party releases were stagnant. We would go quite a while before Nintendo put out another worthwhile release and 3rd party support was very weak. Plus, just the name, Wii U, the marketing would've still been terrible lol, although not as bad if the Wii U was a traditional console.

I think it would be somewhere between the SNES and NES by the end of its lifetime.

If Nintendo can get games out at a similar pace to the actual Wii U and there are more third-party games (but likely not as many as Xbox One and PS4) then you're looking at N64 sales at least, possibly SNES or higher.
Nintendo wouldn't get anywhere close to 100 million in most cases because the console would be too similar to the competition. Nintendo's Blue Ocean strategy is high risk, high reward if it succeeds. DS was earth-shattering, Wii was a mega hit, 3DS ended up as a hit, Wii U tanked, Switch is more in the earth-shattering category.
A more normal 8th gen console sells better but probably not to mega levels.

Maybe 10M or 20M more I guess ?

Would the power of a PS4 impacted Nintendo dev pipeline even further than it did when they were working on the WiiU ? Probably, it was their first HD system. The WiiU architecture would've prolly been different from the one it had too, endangering it's BC feature with the Wii in the first place.

So can we still call it a Wii U anymore ?!

I mean isn't that just the GameCube? So how about this scenario? What if it was just the Wii U and no 3DS? All the resources spent on the 3DS go to the Wii U. Do you think the Wii U would have sold as much as the 3DS? Or would it have sold the same? I feel like one of the reasons why the Switch is such a success is because there's only 1 platform from Nintendo. Perhaps the Wii U would have done better without the 3DS. Although I believe it would be worse for Nintendo overall without the 3DS.

Without the 3DS the WiiU would of sold way less than the 3DS, maybe 2-3M more than the reality WiiU total sold.

The 3DS was seen as a cheap entrance to video games while the WiiU was a more expensive. (Like the Switch Lite and Switch). Without the cheaper option, I dont think parents would opt for a slightly better Wii. They still didn't even with the 3DS option.

At least that's what I think.

It would sold significantly more, more than Xbox One

It would basically be an Xbox with Nintendo first party, a much stronger value than a Xbox with Microsoft first party games


I'd say it would sell 50-60 million with a standars life cycle, and Xbox would sell 20-30 million being rendered basically useless

I think switch would eventually came out anyway but we would still have powerful Nintendo hardware doing 40-50 million units while switch does 120 million tops. I would have said to wouldn't work before but after the Switch yes a ninetndo home console only could  do 50 million plus easy.