[Note: This is the third part of a multi-part post.  In the first part I looked at the ways the Wii ultimately was a failure, and in the second part I looked at the ways Nintendo failed to capitalize on the Wii, helping to create the situation they find themselves in now with the Wii U.]

With the hundred-million-selling Wii having largely faded from public consciousness, Nintendo in 2012 decided to release the Wii U.  Two-and-a-half years later, the system is struggling to reach the ten million sales mark.  Third parties have largely abandoned the console, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to have many bullets left in the clip, having already released entries in most of its major franchises.  It’s unlikely that anything is going to turn this ship around; no matter how good Splatoon is, it’s not going to send another ten or twenty or thirty million people out to buy a Wii U.  No, when all is said and done, the Wii U is going to go down as a failure.  But why did it fail?

Why the Wii U Failed

The Wii U has been a failure for a lot of reasons, some of them inevitable.  As we’ve seen, Nintendo gave up on trying to woo core gamers to instead pursue casual gamers, and by 2012, those gamers had moved on to smartphones and tablets.  Because of Nintendo’s inability to convert Wii owners into reliable customers, any attempt to leverage the Wii’s success to sell a new console was probably bound to fail.  Really, the Wii U falls perfectly in line with what’s been happening to Nintendo for basically ever.  Nintendo’s sales have been in steady decline for decades, the Wii notwithstanding.  Every Nintendo console, except the Wii, has been the worst-selling Nintendo console to date.  A single hit isn’t going to change that if it doesn’t address the core problems behind this decline.

So before the Wii U ever launched, there was a certain amount of baked-in failure.  But even if it was never going to be a Wii-sized, success, it could have been less of a failure.  For one thing, the Wii U probably should have come out sooner.  By the time the Wii U came out, the Wii was not only past its prime but had become something of an afterthought. Continue reading Wii Hardly Knew U, Part 3 →

[Note: This is the second part of a multi-part post.  Check out the first part here.]

In the first part of this post, I examined how Nintendo, with the Wii, traded core gamers for casual gamers, a strategy that worked in the short term but cost Nintendo in the long term.  When smartphones and tablets emerged as a major gaming platform, especially for casual games, they left Nintendo with no market for their new hardware.  They sold over 100 million Wiis, but are struggling to sell one tenth as many Wii Us.  There’s obviously nothing Nintendo could have done to forestall the rise of the mobile games market.  But this doesn’t mean that the evaporation of Nintendo’s audience was a foregone conclusion.

Could Nintendo have transformed the tens of millions of casual, first-time gamers who bought Wiis into a dedicated customer base that would reliably purchase new games and consoles in perpetuity?  Who knows?  It would be a tough job for anyone, at any time.  We can’t know how things might have turned out had Nintendo done this or that.  But we can see pretty clearly a number of ways Nintendo failed to support and take advantage of the Wii. Continue reading Wii Hardly Knew U, Part 2 →

Between the lackluster sales, the dearth of third-party support, the recent announcement of the Nintendo NX, and the indefinite delay of the latest Legend of Zelda game, it would seem the writing’s on the wall for the Wii U.  Though Nintendo insists that the NX won’t be a simple replacement for the Wii U (or 3DS), it’s hard to imagine a scenario where the release of the NX – whatever it is – ends up boosting Wii U sales.  After two and a half years and about 9.5 million units sold, we can confidently declare that the Wii U has been a commercial failure.

Nintendo needs the NX to be successful.  The company remains committed to dedicated gaming devices, but another system that sells as poorly as the Wii U did will force them to reconsider that position.  So what should they do with the NX?  How can they avoid a repeat of the situation they’re in with the Wii U?  To understand that, we need to take a look at everything that went wrong with the Wii U.  And to understand that, we first need to hop into our DeLorean and look at the ways the Wii failed, and the ways Nintendo failed the Wii, because, in a lot of ways, the Wii is what put Nintendo in this mess.

[Note: This was originally going to be one post, but as I’ve been working on it, it’s grown to epic proportions.  So, I’ll be breaking it into a few chunks and posting the first couple parts while I finish the rest of it.  The main gist of the post is to look at the Wii U’s failure and consider what it means for Nintendo going forward, but it’s going to be a bit of a walk to get there.  In part 1, I’ll be looking at how the Wii failed.  In part 2, I’ll be looking at how Nintendo failed the Wii.  In part 3, I’ll be looking at how the Wii U failed.  And in part 4, I’ll be looking at what Nintendo should do going forward.  I aim to have all four parts posted by the middle of next week, but who knows, by then it might have grown into six or eight or fifty parts.  I spend a lot of time thinking about Nintendo.  Anyway, enjoy!] Continue reading Wii Hardly Knew U, Part 1 →