Let's face it, the Wii U (at least as far as sales) lost this generation, We've been saying "Give it a few months and sales will turn around" for too long now and the Wii U is the loser of this generation, even more so than the FREAKING VITA (Just barely though)!!!!!!! I know you're thinking the Ouya did terribly, but don't make me laugh, I've made the mistake of overstating the Ouya, and it isn't even in the same market. So it's time to ask ourselves, what went wrong with the Wii U? How did it fail? Was there anything Nintendo could've done to turn it around?
You could argue that the underpowered nature hurt it, but that's equally true of the Original Wii and that thing sold like crazy. You could also argue the lack of games killed it, but something had to cause that. There's also the argument that developers didn't know how to use it's unique features, but again, equally true off the classic Wii. Yet another argument you could make is that it didn't have the threshhold mobile gaming took on the casual market, but that ties in with the bigger issue, and casual gamers are still buying console games, just not in the droves as apps. The biggest argument that people made is that the name was the killer, but that's only part of the issue.
The biggest problem is that the Wii U didn't know what it wanted to be, was it the Wii 2? Was it the console convincing AAA gamers to return to Nintendo? Was it both? Well casuals have all but moved on from Nintendo to iPhones and Androids, it's the reason you see so many shovelware Wii games in $10 Bargain Bins, and the superficial trappings of the Wii U didn't help. Casuals just couldn't get themselves to jump on board after seeing a line up filled with Call of Duty, and Madden. Middle class families (who the original Wii was aimed at) couldn't justify paying well over a grand for a new HDTV, a new console, and everything else a new console needs. That's the ones that knew the Wii U existed, the average joe didn't know it was a thing, they thought it was add on controller for the Wii. Even today when more info on the Wii U, the average john doesn't know what the Wii U is...
That's where some of the blame's gotta go to Nintendo, even Nintendo (probably) didn't know what to do with the Wii U. They might've had several ideas for making Nintendo relevant, and couldn't decide on one, or multiple ideas in multiple areas. When Wii sales were going down the toilet, they frankensteined those ideas and rushed the final product. This is no more evident than the months leading up to the Wii U, I (along with many others) thought it was a portable for a sec.
A couple paragraphs ago, I mentioned the why casuals weren't interested in the Wii U, but the hardcores goes back to the name, and The Big N's image. Hardcores don't care about about modern Nintendo (especially the Wii), Nintendo tried to gain back their old fans, but It failed, especially with gimped multiplats. It's easy to blame the developers, but they were probably pissed at nintendo, and to that the blames gotta go to us. we didn't give the gamers games a chance when they came out on Nintendo platforms, they weren't that much of a downgrade from the Playstation, XBOX, and Sega (when they made consoles) Ports, that was until the Wii, but if we only supported No More Heroes, MadWorld, and others when they came out, we would've seen Rockstar put a little extra more money on a port of GTA5 by now for the Wii U.
That's in a perfect world, but what really happened was Nintendo wanted to unite gamers both hardcore and casual, they didn't get along. They chose to focus on hardcore gamers, their image along with the Wii name. They chose to focus on casuals, it bombed. Now they're in their own little world, where they're releasing NX in just less than a year. Was there anything thy could've done differently to turn things around? Perhaps. Could they fix it now? Not really. Kind of a damned shame the Wii U lost this generation, but Nintendo was dumb enough to try to make the Wii lightning strike twice, and all we can do now is hope that they can fix things for NX. Best of luck in that endeavor...
NEXT TIME:
We're going to get a little Sexy here on Gaming Bits...
(as sexy as I can make it without parents telling me that "I'M NEVER SHOWING YOUR BLOG TO MY KIDS AGAIN!!!!!")
No comments:
Post a Comment