The Wii U: A Console Ahead of Its Time
Although Nintendo has continued to support the console with updates and online services, it is clear that the Wii U was a difficult time for the company.
With two gigs of RAM, the Wii U does have a healthy advantage over the Xbox 360 and PS3, and in many ways, it is more powerful than its contemporaries. Unfortunately, the Wii U came out in 2012, just a year after both the Xbox One and PS4, making it difficult for Nintendo to compete with the current generation of consoles.
The Wii U's high-performance capabilities are overshadowed by its poor sales figures. The console's price point was also a significant challenge, with the basic white version costing $300 and the deluxe edition $350. Even after dropping the price of the deluxe model from $350 to $300, Nintendo struggled to boost sales.
One of the main reasons for the Wii U's poor sales is the lack of third-party support. The console's limited appeal to developers was largely due to the high cost of creating games that utilized the Wii U's innovative features, such as the GamePad. With only 118 titles from non-Nintendo developers released in the US, it's clear that the Wii U struggled to attract a wide range of third-party support.
Additionally, many of Nintendo's first-party titles were ported to the Switch, and some are even better than their original versions on the Wii U. The console's poor sales figures have left fans wondering what could have been if the Wii U had received more support from developers.
In conclusion, the Wii U was a console ahead of its time, but unfortunately, it struggled to find its place in the market. Despite its technical advantages and innovative features, the console's poor sales figures and lack of third-party support make it difficult for Nintendo to look back on the Wii U era with pride.
Reason number one is that the Wii U was released during a crowded year for consoles. The release window for the Wii U was quite challenging due to the simultaneous release of several high-profile consoles, including both the Xbox One and PS4. This led to a difficult time competing with these current generation consoles.
Another reason why the Wii U struggled would be its hardware capabilities versus what other companies were releasing at that moment in time - particularly those from the PS3 and XBOX 360 families as they had around two gigs of RAM like the wii u, however these systems did release a bit later than Nintendo's console giving it a difficult time competing with these systems.
Reason number four is related to price. The Wii U came out in 2012, which meant that it was coming out just one year before both the Xbox One and PS4. This made it challenging for Nintendo to compete with the current generation of consoles when there were so many powerful machines on the market already.
WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- This video is sponsored by Mevo.Hey guys, this is Austin.The Wii U was the biggestflop in Nintendo history.Now sure, they had weirdexperiments like the Virtual Boy,but coming off of themassively successful Wii,there was a real sense thatNintendo could do no wrong.And yet, we have this.Reason number one, is a simple one.The name was just not a good idea.Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii Uwas not a bad console, but a lot of peoplefirst of all didn't even realizethat it was even aseparate console by itself.Lots and lots of people just thoughtthat it was a tablet add-onfor the original Wii.And I mean, with ads likethis, can you blame them?- And did we mention, togetherness?- Just check out the simulation.- Whoa!- Don't get me wrong, aton of people made funof the name of the original Wii,at least until it was inbasically every living roomon the face of the planet.The problem is that sixyears after the launchof the original Wii,Nintendo brought this outand a lot of people just asked,what exactly was it?It is a big problem, whentons of people don't realizethat your shiny brand new console,is an actual shiny new console,not some add-on for the original Wii.Especially when you consider,that after 100 millionsales of the original Wiiand merely 13 million with the Wii U,Nintendo had a major branding problem,that honestly could have been solvedby just calling this theWii 2, or you know, the WiiWant You To Buy Our Console Edition.Reason number two why theWii U was sales challengedhad to do with the tablet that servedas it's controller, the GamePad.Now it's easy to forget that back in 2012,tablets were touted as the next big thing.Unfortunately, what wasnot the next big thing,was a giant unwieldy tabletthat was completely uselessif it was not connectedto its base station.That's the beauty of aconsole like the Switch.It has pretty much noneof the same down sidesas the Wii U, so you'regoing to be gettinga more powerful system, that'sgoing to be a lot smaller,a lot more portable,and to top it all off,you can take it with you anywhere.As opposed to the Wii U where,you can take this anywhere,as long as this is nomore than 20-25 feet away.With the Wii U, the GamePad reliedon a local wireless connection.Now while that was fine for the most part,get too far away and itcompletely falls apart.However, once you're actuallyclose to the Wii U consoleit does work pretty well.In theory, you couldnever plug this into a TV,and just use the GamePadfor all of your game play.At launch, the GamePadalso had another problem.Not very good battery life.So the first models would lastsomewhere in the neighborhoodof three to three and ahalf hours on a chargewhich really isn't great for a controller.Thankfully later models didbump that up to somethingcloser to six to seven,but if you're one of thoseearly adopters of theWii U, you had better notstay too far from a charger with this guy.Now this might sound likea little bit of a nitpick,but one of the issues,especially with games likeSuper Smash Bros., is that whilethis is always gonna beone of your controllers,you can only ever have one GamePad pairedwith the Wii U at the same time.Meaning that if everyone comes overfor a game of SmashBros., someone's alwaysgonna get stuck with the giant controller.However, don't get me wrong,this is not all bad by any means.So first of all, theidea that this has a lotof interesting tech thatwas legitimately newfor the time is cool.Stuff like NFC support for Amiibos,which would come a little bit later,really was the first time that thiswas ever shown in a Nintendo console.And the idea that you do have a camera,you do have decent controls,even though it's a little bit big,a touch screen, there'sa lot to like here.But, this was a major hurdlefor the Wii U to overcomeand a lot of peoplejust straight up thoughtthat it was an accessoryfor the original Wii.Kinda hard to get over that one.- Hot buttered popcorn, that's a deal!- Before we move on, I wannagive a huge shout out to Mevofor sponsoring this video.So what you're looking at right nowis being shot on a Mevo camera.It's basically the next bestthing to having your own Ken.What's so cool about the Mevo,is that it is a small pocketable 4K camerathat has full capabilitiesof turning itselfinto a livestreaming control room.So basically, once youpair it with the app,you can use that to be ableto pan around the shot,do zooms, do punch ins,and all of this stuffis going to be completelydigital thanks to that 4K sensor.What makes the Mevo unique,is that this single cameracan livestream to a variety of sourcesincluding YouTube, Facebook,as well as Periscope.What's cool is, because it's so smalland it does have atripod mount in the box,you can easily set this up on the go.So in addition to beingable to work over wifi,you can also connect it to your phoneand use it over LTE to livestreamsomething like a concert, or in my case,I can livestream a supercool match of Mario Kart.One of my favorite partsreally is how the app works.So really simply I cansay, zoom out on the shot.I can tap on my face, Ican tap on the screen,I can sort of punch in, punch out,there's really so many different optionsto be able to kind of get amore studio quality experienceout of a camera that is reallygoing to fit in your pocket.So if you wanna up your livestream game,definitely be sure togo check out the Mevoat the link in the description,and while you're there youcan check out my coupon codewhich'll get you like $50 off.Anyway, huge shout out to Mevofor sponsoring this video.- Here's why we need Wii U.Reason number three has to do with power.It's easy to forget, butthe Wii U actually came outonly a year before theXbox One and the PS4.Where the Wii was essentiallyjust a faster GameCube,the Wii U did somelegitimately interesting stuff.Of course, one of biggestleaps, was the leap to HD,something that the Xbox 360beat it to by like seven years.However there was moreto it than just that.As opposed to the anemic single core CPUthat was found in boththe GameCube and the Wii,instead the Wii U stepped all the way upto a triple core PowerPC processor.Although, this was hardlycutting edge, even back in 2012.Nintendo also includeda dual AMD GPU set up.Well, technically at least.So in addition to the standard GPU,which is what the Wii U usesto run its normal games,you're also going to begetting a copy of the Wii GPU.Now this is for backwards compatibility,and it does work really well here.Although interestingly,you actually can unlockGameCube backwards compatibility as well,although that is definitely notgoing to be fully supported.At least, if you ask Nintendo.With two gigs of RAM, the Wii U does havea healthy advantage overXbox 360 as well as the PS3,and in a lot of ways, the Wii U isgoing to be more powerful.Unfortunately, the Wii U came out in 2012,and again, being only a year awayfrom both the Xbox One and PS4 meantthat this really had adifficult time competingwith the current generation of consoles.Just like the Wii, it had a lotof interesting capabilities,but high performancedefinitely wasn't one of them.Reason number four has to do with price.So when the Wii U first cameout there were two models.First of all, a basic white versionwhich looks very, verysimilar to the original Wii,and then there's the black deluxe edition,which was a little bit more expensive,and at least didn't look quite so muchlike the console that it was replacing.(clears throat)Considering that youwere getting a consolewith roughly the samepower as the outgoingXbox 360 and PS3, pricesweren't exactly cheap.So the basic model camewith only eight gigabytesof storage for $300, and even stepping upto the deluxe model wouldstill only get you 32 gigsof storage at a $350 price tag.Now to be fair, it wasn'tall bad from the start.The first couple months ofthe Wii U being on sale,Nintendo sold over three million units.Unfortunately after that,well sales kinda felloff of a cliff, and theyreally never recovered.Due to the high cost ofthe GamePad which hadto be included with every single Wii U,Nintendo really didn'thave a lot of optionsto be able to boost the lagging sales.So after about a year, they were ableto drop the price on the deluxe modelfrom $350 to $300, whichdid make an effect,but at the end of the day,there really was not a lotof room for them to do anythingbesides hope that peoplewould finally buy thismisunderstood, wonderful console.Now if that was the onlyproblem with the Wii U,they probably would have been just fine.However, with problems quickly mounting,the Wii U having only beenon sale for less than a year,the real challengers werecoming up very quickly.PS4 and Xbox One, as you might imagine,very quickly outsold the WiiU, and never looked back.That brings us to reason number five,why the Wii U was a failure.Third party support, or more specificallythe almost complete lack thereof.Now let's be real, theoriginal Wii did have a lotof third party games, the problem was,most of them were complete garbage.(marching music)However, with a hundredmillion consoles in the wild,a lot of developers, in fact,pretty much all developersreally didn't have a lot of choice,you had to make a Wii game.Now when it comes to the Wii U,they didn't really have that constraint,which meant that they really didn't haveto actually make Wii Ugames, and so, they didn't.To be fair, there weresome third party gameson the Wii U, most specifically Ubisoftactually did support itfor the first few years.However, the issue was, isthat with so few consolesin the wild, and such a huge disparitybetween the performance of the Wii Uand the brand new Xbox One and PS4,it was very difficult for developersto justify spending the time and moneyto bring an actually decentWii U game to the platform.Making things more complicatedwas the promise of the GamePad.Of course, most first partiesdidn't take great advantageof this, so when it comesto third party support,yeah, that really wasn't a thing.Now to really put things in context,the finally tally here inthe US for third party gamesreleased on the Wii U,was a mere 118 titles.That is far less than anyother main Nintendo console.By a lot.Now don't get me wrong,there were some amazingNintendo titles for the Wii U,but at this point, almostall of them have been portedto the Switch, and are oftentimeseven better than their original versions.The ones that haven't been portedare pretty much already on the way.It was a cool console, therewas a lot they did right.But the games either weren't there,or are just better on Switch today anyway.It's kind of ironic tothink that the Switchreally is just a Wii U 2.0 with the techthat actually supportsthe original vision.Sometimes it just goes to show,success and failure canbe two different sidesof the same coin.- And that's how it's done.
