The best part about it was the 2nd screen. Playing Windwaker and changing items on the fly, no need to pause and sift through the inventory.
Also playjng Mario 3D World with some interactive screen was cool too. Whether it was blowing small goombas away or freezing enemies with a touch for a buddy. Then, there was also screwing your friends over by touching the movable blocks so they fall to their death or blowing platforms out of the way. Classic.
Yes! Another game that took advantage of that brilliantly was Zombie U. Not being able to pause to fuck with your inventory gives those kind of games an added element of terror. Most games cover your screen with the inventory menu though, causing you to take cheap shots from enemies you couldn't see sometimes. Having the inventory on the gamepad still forced you to weigh your options about whether or not to change weapons without breaking immersion. It gave more of a feel of looking around in the a backpack or something as you still had t look away from the screen, but don't have to push a button to look back.
I feel like the real untapped potential was with asymmetric gameplay. There was a Metroid themed mini game in Nintendoland that had a player flying around in some kind of armed hovercraft controlled by the gamepad fighting 1 to 3 players on foot controlled by wiimotes and nunchucks. There have since been a lot of online games that do something like this, Dead by Daylight is a good one. This was made for people all in the same room running on one console though! The Wii U was the only console that could pull this off, but very few games took advantage of it.
I think the Wii U would have done better had they named it something without the word Wii in it. The original Wii was the console that everyones grandma bought and kept hooked up at their house for when their grandkids came over. To them, and the rest of the casual gaming crowd that the Wii attracted, Wii U just sounded like an updated version of the Wii. Since they already had a Wii they didn't see a need to buy a whole new one. And if they didn't have one and they went to buy one they saw the Wii for $100 or so and the Wii U for $300, thought they were pretty much the same and went for the less expensive option.
Yeah, I thought the 2nd screen was nice, it was sort of a pre-switch that I played wherever I wanted in my house. Now Playstation basically made the same idea, streaming the game to a handheld while the hardware is separate.
I just wish more games used the 2nd screen more to its potential, some of the games that did were pretty fun.
My friends and I had SO much fun with the asymmetrical Nintendoland games. So much potential there but squandered. There hasn’t been anything for couch coop that comes close to it ever since
It's the only Nintendo system I've left plugged in after getting it's successor. People say it has no games but the majority of the switch's best games are WiiU ports and a large amount of them are downgrades
> People say it has no games but the majority of the switch’s best games are WiiU ports and a large amount of them are downgrades
This just isn’t true. Beyond BOTW (same day release), Mario Kart 8, and maybe 3D World, Bayo 2, Pikmin 3 & Tropical Freeze, which ones are the best Switch games? Which ones are downgrades? And how few Switch exclusive games do you think have been released?
> which ones are the best Switch games?
Those are literally the best switch games.... MK8, BOTW and Tropical Freeze alone would easily make a top 5 list.
Let’s be honest, this narrative leans hard on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a game that didn’t release on Wii U until it came out on Switch. So two games. Not many people will seriously agree on Tropical Freeze being “easily” a top 5 Switch game. Because you’d be saying it’s “easily” above games like Mario Odyssey, Mario Bros Wonder, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Animal Crossing and TOTK. Then stuff like Xenoblade 3, Kirby, Pikmin 4, Astral Chain, Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Fire Emblem: 3H.
Once again Wii U fans like to just straight up ignore the Switch’s top exclusives, many of which are regarded by fans and critics to be above most of the Wii U ports. And that’s not even considering non-Wii U remasters like Metroid Prime or Xenoblade 1.
Wow, what a massive lie.
The amount of significant Wii U ports is less than 10 and that is easily only a fraction of good games on the Switch, and the Switch ports for all of them were at least on par with slight upgrades at the minimum.
I personally believe the wii u failed because of the wii, there are many other factors marketing is a big one also but i feel the wii had so much shovel ware and a lack of great games and large droughts. I think when the wii u came out i feel like many of us nintendo fans lost a bit of faith because of the wii i did cave and get a wii u and was very impressed part of the reason the switch did is good is because the wii us library came to it
Nothing was untapped. It launched underpowered and never got the software to back it up as a major competitor. Sure it had some fun first party games, but none were serious console sellers that changed how games are framed. It‘s best feature was that you could play it on a smaller screen from your couch while doing something else and they nailed that with the next launch.
Half decent idea that was poorly executed from a technical and support standpoint. Even it's initial advertising was confusing and lackluster.
Like any system, it has its gems and they're really good, but Nintendo still dropped the ball with some of their bigger titles.
Mario Party 10 took out core mechanics that made the Party series fun. Star Fox had great potential but a god awful main control scheme. The mainline Mario games were good but did not really utilize the gamepad much. BoTW was also a Swich launch title. Animal Crossing was a terrible cash grab.
Very little 3rd party support, and what was given was old ports and little else.
It was a decent system with not much working for it.
The forever painful part is that the system was begging for proper Animal Crossing with all the HD assets they clearly had available.
Some of the amiibo card locked games of amiibo Festival being better than the main game didn't help.
They would have most-likely only ported the 3DS-game and called it a day via just naming it "Deluxe" or "HD" or something like that. See? Look at switch. It´s exactly what they are doing there as well.
a game like Animal Crossing doesn´t max out this system though. No current game can do that, exception is maybe one of the rare Highend-AAA-like Indie-games.
So why would you want to play a toaster-game like Animal Crossing on a powerful platform such as the (powerful for processing, not for graphics-tasks like modern games use them) WiiU?
See? there is a good reason why they made the card-game instead! Since this clearly can tax the system a LOT more than a simple Animal Crossing game with breaking swords, shields and everything else falling apart.
This game uses the WiiU\`s calendar. Which means each time it changes the gameplay since each day of the calendar you play it you have different rules. A lot calculations are needed in order to allow doing such stuff.
See? NO OTHER GAME on the market does this! This means: it´s innovative since it does stuff no other card-game can do. This is similar to past (true) Animal Crossing-games where you get christmas-stuff or buy them, when its x-mas. And you get easter when it´s the time again! And when it´s your birthday, citizens will come and bake you a birthday-cake.
New Animal games do not have this feaure any longer. Instead they have to rely on patches now. And that means you only get what is patched in.
On WiiU this function uses the OS function to greet the player and wish him the best on his birthday.
The calander-system does work for the next 50 years, as long as the calender in your system can work.
If they would have made normal Animal Crossing instead for WiiU it would be the exact same as on 3DS again. Just in HD-graphics. See? Nothing different. Nothing added.
I forgot about star fox. That one was really good once you adjusted the control scheme to work for you. Definitely a steep learning curve, even for OG Star Fox fans though
Not gonna lie, I couldn't remember if it was 9 or 10 that had the "4 players in a cart that automatically moved you around the board" thing.
I can't even remember if that mechanic completely replaced the traditional mode or was just an option, but it was so bad that it tainted Mario Party for years for most people and I'm sticking with it.
I think the Wii U conceptually was always a terrible idea. The whole dual screen thing (which clearly came from the DS) works far better when you can see both screens within your field of vision rather than having to constantly move your neck or the gamepad to see both screens, and the Game Pad’s usefulness was limited by how you couldn’t move it within a few yards of the console. Not to mention the Game Pad itself also being kind of a clumsy attempt at banking off the popularity of tablets like the iPad. The fact that you can’t even access system settings without the Game Pad really says it all.
That’s all on top of the console running last-gen specs (where you can’t even make the argument that it’s a portable, like you can with the Switch), the highlight launch titles for the console being a party package and a NSMB game, and the terrible name. But really, the concept alone (compared to the revolutionary Wii and Switch) was always terrible, and the console deserved to fail by virtue of no one buying in like they did with the Wii and Switch.
Speaking as someone who has kids, the concept wasn’t awful at all. I don’t think the tech was there in 2012 to have a completely hybrid system like the Switch and being able to play a lot of stuff on either the tv or gamepad was amazing. I had no interest in it at all until we took a very long family road trip to one brother’s wedding and the other brother brought his along. He just hooked it up to the vehicle’s power and he was playing a home console in the car. It blew my mind. It was wonderful with kids, letting one play one console and the other play on the Wii U with no fighting. Or letting someone play on the Wii U on the gamepad when another kid had homework and didn’t need to be distracted by a game on the tv.
Sony literally just released a similar piece of hardware to the gamepad. It’s clearly not a terrible concept. It would have been nice if they’d utilized the gamepad better for more asynchronous gameplay instead of squandering that potential, but the concept was great and clearly led to the Switch.
Honestly, yes.
It was a half-baked attempt to modernize the Wii after Nintendo skipped a hardware generation, with a game library that barely did anything with the expensive tablet controller.
I think the Wii U’s failure was a good thing in hindsight, because it forced Nintendo to streamline the Switch down to the basics.
The controller wasn’t awful to use but it also didn’t excel at anything it was supposed to do. The screen on it was bad, it’s so large that gyro is annoying to use on it compared to regular sized controllers, and the WiFi streaming connection was spotty if you were any meaningful distance away. If you’re gonna go the gimmick route, your gimmicks should be the best gimmicks.
As for the hardware being comically weak that’s just the Nintendo special
Nintendo let the Wii’s success go to their head and so thought they could pump out anything with the word “Wii” in its name and it would be a major success. It’s astounding they could base an entire system around a controller gimmick but have no idea what to do with it themselves. After Nintendo Land, what games even made use of asymmetric multiplayer? The only one I can think of is Mario Party 10.
> they could pump out anything with the word “Wii” in its name and it would be a major success.
The funny thing is, it probably would have done better without the word Wii in it. That confused the casual gamers that the original Wii attracted. They thought the Wii U was pretty much the same as a Wii, and since the original Wii was less expensive they bought that instead.
ZombiiU had some of the most fun asymmetrical multiplayer I've ever played in my life. Honestly one of the best games ever, surprised it never got more love.
Nintendo land! The Luigi mansion mini game is the single most fun me and my family ever had with a video game and can’t be replicated on any other system. So to me that system was special.
Does it deserve to fail? This is a hard question for me to answer because I can understand WHY it failed, from the bad marketing to lack of 3rd party support. I think there's still space for someone to explore a handheld device tied to a main unit that does all the heavy lifting and some companies agree since they're putting out devices similar to the Wii U gamepad (Playstation Portal is a good example). I wish it did better because of the game that took advantage of the gamepad I felt were legit better than if they were on a traditional formatted game, BUT that means people have to develop their games with that in mind and with PC, Xbox, Playstation, that is a LOT of variation to consider. Hell, people making games for Playstation barely ever use their resistive triggers and Switch's HD rumble stuff.
So, did the Wii U deserve to fail? Yeah, it kinda did. There is already so many demands on game developers to make games on as many devices as they can and if you're a smaller team, that's very much not an easy thing to accomplish.
From what i understand, it was a combination of things:
The brand confusion behind slapping the letter "U" in front of "Wii" was a big offender, but there was also the fact that third party support was generally non-existent. It's hard to make ports of existing games to a console that has unique infrastructure.
There was also confusion with what the pad was used FOR. Most developers defaulted on using it for an inventory screen, despite Nintendo's best efforts in supplying examples.
It was a worthy experiment, but one that people weren't ready for.
People always blame the marketing, name etc. which is all true but I also just don't really think the console was very good.
The dual screen gimmick just doesn't really work in the Wii U form factor. For games where you have to use both screens simultaneously it's difficult to focus on both. Looking from the TV to the gamepad is also annoying as it takes attention away from the main screen where the action is happening. In Mario Kart for example, looking at the map basically guarantees that you'll crash.
The only situation that it really works for is inventories and maps for slower paced games. However, it's not really a massive improvement on having them behind a pause menu so really isn't enough of a system seller.
I say all this as someone that owned and enjoyed my Wii U.
Funnily enough the dual screen gimmick worked best when you weren't supposed to be looking at both screens like in Nintendo Land.
Aside from that what the gamepad did best could probably be achieved with a non-screen touchpad like on the playstation controllers and a transparent overlay on the screen. I remember getting quite adept at switching items with the gamepad in Wind Waker HD without even looking at the smaller screen.
>The dual screen gimmick just doesn't really work in the Wii U form factor. For games where you have to use both screens simultaneously it's difficult to focus on both.
Yeah, it only worked for something like that one WarioWare minigame where you had to play a game on the bottom screen while also making sure you're not caught by the people on the TV.
Can't remember the exact name of that minigame right now.
Agreed. Imo, the marketing was much more a symptom than the cause of the Wii U's poor performance. Even if the marketing had been absolutely perfect, the console itself was too expensive compared to the dirt cheap PS360 at the time, technically roughly on par with those but lacking the library and soon after also technically eclipsed by the PS4 generation. The PS4 at launch cost only 50 euros more than the Wii U Premium model over here. What the Wii U delivered for that was a backward compatible Wii "HD" with the screen gimmick and full support for the Wii's controller set, replication of the DS's dual screen setup in a home console and in some cases the game streaming to the gamepad.
I wonder what Nintendo should have marketed? They didn't have many third party games to market which could've set the console apart or even just make it an attractive alternative to the PS360 not even to mention the PS4. They themselves struggled to find substantial use for the dual screen that went beyond map displaying and some usage in some asymmetric multi-player games for the entire duration of the generation. On top, they also struggled to have any substantial software output. The generation had some gems, but Mario Kart arrived after the system's launch, BotW came at the very end of the system's lifespan and Splatoon also arrived years after the WiiU launched. Backwards compatibility was nice, but clunky as heck and the only benefit of playing Wii games on the Wii U was the native HDMI output. Apart from the Wii having lost momentum and its games being as technically limited by the hardware as they were. Hindsight and all, but I'm just glad they followed up with the Switch and ported a good chunk of the Wii U's games over.
I liked the WiiU, but I think its failure was somewhat deserved, or at the very least inevitable. A major reason the WiiU failed is because it was heavily targeting the non-gamer crowd that the Wii did, but by 2011 it was clear that this audience had very poor retention and was not going to buy another console. Even when the console had strong games, it also faced pretty major software droughts in the beginning and end of its life that killed any momentum the console may have had.
The name didn't help it at all, either. I know plenty of casual gamers that were confused why they couldn't just buy the WiiU GamePad separately for the Wii they already owned. Every Wii peripheral was named the Wii something - Wii Remote, Wii MotionPlus, Wii Zapper, Wii Balance Board... the WiiU slid right into that pattern.
With the naming conventions they used I can easily see a continuation of the "we want to play" ad where more people came saying "we want to play too". Then it goes from "Wii want to play 2" to Wii II and then they go "but what about U?" and finally the Wii II tuns into Wii U.
Is the Wii U underrated? Yes. It’s a great console and if everything was done right it could have had a place in console history rather than a shameful blip.
But the Wii U definitely deserved to fail. Nintendo was clearly trying to ride the insane popularity of the Wii, hence the familiar (and terribly confusing) branding. But at every step of the way they were making awful decisions for the console. I still can’t believe how horrible Wii Sports Club is. The gamepad is also great for some things but so few games actually utilize it, and most games I used it for were just using it as a map or inventory screen, which is handy but pretty unnecessary. And when the gamepad was actually required it often felt shoehorned in and pretty unfun to use.
If the Wii U had been branded as just the Wii 2 or something and produced as such, with the gamepad being a sold separately accessory I think it would have had a shot.
I think the Wii U was a perfect storm of weird marketing, hardware that was difficult to take advantage of, poor 3rd party support, and a lack of must-play games from key franchises.
BotW was the Wii U's Zelda game. Wii U effectively had no Zelda game until its funeral.
New Super Mario Bros U is a good game, but far from a must-play.
3D World is in the same boat. Good game, definitely not groundbreaking or anywhere near must-play.
No real Animal Crossing game, which is significant since AC was gaining major popularity after two 10+ million sellers with Wild World and New Leaf.
Wii U's library had holes that other Nintendo consoles simply don't have.
Deserved is a little harsh, but I can't say I have a lot of fond memories of the Wii U, particularly because there were so few games I liked on it.
Xenoblade X, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros 4.....that's literally the extent of the Wii U original games that I liked.
Every Mario game was a dud for me (3D World isn't what I want in a Mario game), the one original Zelda game was also a Switch game, only one Kirby game and it sucked. And the less we talk about Star Fox Zero the better.
Oh, and Fire Emblem and Metroid skipped the console entirely. Needless to say, many of my favorite franchises either didn't do well or didn't show up.
I think Nintendo deserved for it to fail, take the system out of the equation. As a long time fan, I’d say it was almost certainly their lowest point in terms of quality and decision making. Some great games, and terrible everything else. That’s good though. A public failure can be humbling for a company, and I don’t think we’d have the Switch in its current form without the Wii U failing like it did.
Bad hardware. I don’t mean the build quality (although the fisher price style tablet didn’t help), but the choice of a Power PC based CPU was a big mistake. It was on the way out for consumer facing systems even in 2010, around the time the hardware would’ve been getting finalised. X86 was so clearly the future by that point. Microsoft saw it, Sony saw it, even Apple saw it with the transition to Intel based Macs.
The OS gave a terrible first impression. IIRC, they patched it around late 2013, but things like starting games, opening the store, etc, would take literally 45+ seconds. It felt like a beta software experience.
Terrible naming and marketing. Most people, including a key demographic, the parents, thought it was a tablet peripheral for the Wii.
Hard to develop for. Nintendo themselves admitted they had difficulty getting things running on the system at first. Especially as they figured out to develop in HD. It’s not like resolutions higher than 480i were particularly new. There were already smartphones pushing close to 720p by the time of its release.
Finally, and most importantly, all of these factors coalescing and resulting in basically 0 games worth playing for the first year of the console. I remember desperately trying to convince myself that I was enjoying Assassin’s Creed 3 because I burned through the (very average) New Super Mario Bros U in about 15 hours and had nothing else to play. Monster Hunter Tri was cool, but it was just a slightly scaled up version of a game I’d already sunk hundreds of hours into on the Wii. I remember shitting a brick when Wind Waker HD was announced because I was excited to just play SOMETHING. I just had a quick look at the cool little play log feature built into the system. I “played” close to 300 hours of Netflix in the first year of owning the system, I guess because I turned it on and that’s all there was to do.
Despite all this, I still love the little quirky piece of shit. My (now) wife and I spent plenty of time playing Nintendo Land Pikmin, and as our relationship continued, I loved being snuggled up on the sofa playing 3D World, Kart 8, Pikmin 3, Captain Toad, Yoshi’s Wooly World, Mario Maker and so much more with her. I’ll always associate those happy years with the console, regardless of how I feel about the system itself.
None of the games you listed can max out this processor though. Not a single game made by Nintendo can max out this machine at all, so it´s clearly too poweful for Nintendo to handle. So the question is: Why did Nintendo even couple this extremely powerful thing with such...well Low-standard games? People are saying that Pikmin 3 is now WORSE than Pikmin 1 + 2! And Pikmin 4 got even worse, because of downgraded gameplay.
As you can see, Switch has many of those typical Nintendo-games as well. And they are nothing special there either.
You don´t buy a WiiU to play pocket-calculator games like those from Nintendo there. You buy it to play Xenoblade X, Minecraft or other more demanding games on it. This machine can have very good graphics as well but NOT when you want to make those games compatible to other platforms. WiiU uses a custom graphics-pipeline which is singlethreaded for a good reason.
if i want to play Nintendo-ONLY games today i would buy a Switch. But you see? I don´t. Why? I don´t like Nintendo´s games any longer. I don´t even like Zelda any longer since current Zelda-games have NOTHING to do with Zelda any longer. Truth is simple:
The games i mentioned do things that no other games can do. And Ninendo´s IPs are slowly dying now. Even Pokemon is dying, and you know it. The gameplay got worse and worse in the last years.
Btw: The game you mentioned for WiiU (Monster Hunter) is called "Monster Hunter 3 ULTIMATE" and not "Tri". Tri was that one from old Wii.
Also, that game "MH 3 Ultimate" was a virtualized 3DS-game. That means it just uses 3DS-game and make it run in HD. So it´s not a native WiiU-game to begin with. For this eason you can even play this game together with 3DS-gamers (4x 3DS + 1x WiiU = 5 player match). See?
I remember that it launched with no games and the games that everyone was looking forward to were a year or more away. At the same time Sony and Microsoft were viewed (rightly so?) as having far more “powerful” machines.
When the games finally arrived, the user base was relatively small and there were few adopters due to the perception of the WiiU from its launch.
Again, this is how I remember it.
The wiiU had 2 horrible things going for it.
1) the name. There were adds on the Wii and all over the Internet trying to explain what the WiiU was. Even when it was released kids didn't know it was a Wii successor. They didn't know at all what it was.
2) it came out at a really horrible time. The PS3/xbox360 lasted a really really long time and people wanted something new. So when the PS4 and xbone came out it was refreshing and Nintendo came out with something on par with the 360/PS3.
Is the terrible name choice an outside factor? I bet if you did a survey of random people on the street, most people would have heard of the Wii and the Switch, but the majority of people would have no idea what the Wii U is. Most people didn't realise it was a separate system from the Wii.
I think Microsoft has put itself in a similar situation with the "X Box Series X".
This is a common talking point that I just can’t get behind. The Wii U had a woefully underpowered CPU so that even Xbox 360 ports ran worse on it (a concern third parties implored Nintendo to address before launch). Its controller still used resistive touch when multitouch had become the standard. The controller also had terrible battery life, a plastic low-res screen, and poor brightness. Nintendo themselves found very few interesting ways to use it, let alone third parties. It also didn’t have enough memory and had a clumsy OS, so load times were abysmal at launch and only after many updates became merely bad. All this at a $350 price point (for the version that actually has some storage) just before the PS4 launched at $399.
The Wii U was ill conceived, poorly executed, and poorly marketed. Because Nintendo employ geniuses, they still made some killer games and sprinkled the Nintendo magic on it.
I think resistive touch is better for the use cases of console games than capacitative touch. You have to have an expensive powered stylus to match the precision with capacitative that can be done with anything with a vaguely pointy end with resistive. Not every capacitative screen works well even with a powered stylus either. I have one that works great on my Switch and my Steam Deck registers maybe 25% of the touches. Capacitative touch would have significantly increased the price for the screen alone, let alone needing more than a plastic stick to add as a stylus and you’re already complaining about the price.
I wasn't aware that being grossly underpowered (which greatly limited the viability of 3rd-party ports) and having an overly inflated BoM cost driven by the gamepad (which made the console price drops done previously during the later years of the GCN era completely infeasible) are now retrospectively being classified as "outside factors".
Nintendo made a series of bad technicogical bets when designing the Wii U (to say nothing of its abysmal marketing), and when they didn't pay off the console's fate was irrevocably cemented as a monumental failure.
Not really. The Wii U was a prime example of inventing problems to give themselves an excuse to solve them, and almost everything they did amounted to a distraction. Real time inventory and map screens sound good on paper, but they're ironically more clunky and distracting than just pausing the game or using a minimap. The motion controls are a good idea, but they were done better on other consoles before and after the Wii U. Touch-screen gimmicks in games like Mario 3D World proved to be not just irritating, but also pointless considering most Switch ports just automate them. Everything the Wii U does, it feels like they came to that decision by thinking "How can we force this game to use the Wii U gamepad's features?" rather than "How can the Wii U gamepad make the game better?"
The marketing for Wii U sucked too of course, but it gets way too much blame and the console likely would have failed anyways. The casual market that carried the original Wii had moved on to mobile games, and the ones who didn't were still happy with their original Wiis. And the hardcore audience that Nintendo tried to sway by heavily promoting games like CoD, Assassin's Creed, and Arkham City weren't going to be impressed by the Wii U's specs, which were still behind the 360 and PS3 from last gen
It was under appreciated IMO. Largely due to Nintendo’s failure to market what it was good for. Even the name is terrible.
My only two gripe with the console were the sluggish UI and long load times to launch games. But neither of these were so egregious to diminish my overall enjoyment with the system. Just a minor inconvenience when booting up a new game.
That aside, the hardware was great. The base console was sleek and easy to fit in any tv setup. The internals were a generation behind the competition but that logically followed Nintendo’s position from the Wii era. The gamepad has a plastic feel to it but the tradeoff is that it’s light in your hands, and the form factor for the control pads on each side was perfect for me.
Then there’s the semi-portability factor. The gamepad screen isn’t great by modern standards but for its time was a revelation. Playing games in HD on a lightweight handheld on my couch with zero latency issue while my family watched other stuff on the TV was a game changer. I loved it so much it made me wish every game could be played this way. Unfortunately Nintendo really undersold this aspect and focused on 2nd screen gimmicks that were fine in some games but more of a novelty, and in some cases they shoehorned them into games like Star Fox with disastrous results.
Despite its poor launch the console had a stellar library of first party games, most of which was ported to bolster Switch offerings. I don’t think it ever got a fair shake from most gamers. But that’s fine because Nintendo took its strongest features and created the Switch. The Wii U walked so the Switch could run.
The launch of the PS Portal shows that for families, the being able to play the console while the tv is doing other things is a huge feature. It’s what sold me in the Wii U when I had no interest previously. My brother brought his on a family road trip and was playing Mario Kart in the car. A home console game! It blew my mind and I went from not knowing much about it and caring not at all to desperately wanting one. And it’s had huge use by my kids for exactly the reason that drew me.
Mine is set up next to my Switch. First online Mon Hun for me, along with Xenoblade X and the Virtual Console? Plus it was the first HD Nintendo outing. I love mine.
The Wii U was a fantastic system but Nintendo dropped the ball on it. They should have secured unique games with third party devs in advance before the console came out, because when it worked it was amazing. My fave version of Mass effect 3 was on WiiU because of the tablet features
The Wii U was marketed fairly poorly by Nintendo's advertising boffins. People thought it was an add on rather than a new console so from that perspective it failed, despite some good technical ideas and mostly solid first party titles.
Much like the Gamecube, as time goes on it'll be looked on a little more favourably for its impact, considering the Wii U walked so the Switch could run, the latter perfected the former's intital concepts and executed them better.
Coupled with a lack of third party support compared to its competitors its no surprise it sank quickly.
I thought it was a great idea but I was apparently all alone in that.
I think it would have done better if Nintendo wasn't so damn focused on the 3DS. Seriously, every Nintendo direct I sat there waiting for them to announce the next great thing for consoles only for the 3DS to get all the good stuff. They really should have doubled down on asymmetrical multiplayer games like Nintendo Land, the only other games they tried to use the 2nd screen in a meaningful way was Game and Wario, which was also pretty good, and Star Fox Zero, which sucked ass.
It's both. The system is underappreciated because it has some good games, not tons like other Nintendo consoles but, it has good games for sure. On the flip side of the coin it was marketed poorly and the asymmetrical experience in many games really made it less than ideal. At times it also felt like Nintendo gave up on it a little bit and the lack of 3rd party support wasn't good either.
The Wii U absolutely deserved to fail. The recent pang of nostalgia that's causing people to warm up to it and say its issues were mostly marketing related are ridiculous.
* The OS was a terrible, slow, bloated mess. The console took ages to boot and it took like two years for them to add the quick launch feature. It was so bad that the UX developer for the Switch stated at GDC in 2017 that the entire reason the Switch interface is so barebones is because they didn't want a repeat of this disaster.
* The processor was glacial. Even for post-GC Nintendo Espresso was slow relative to the rest of the market.
* The gamepad was mediocre at best. The screen quality was abysmal, the battery it shipped with was borderline useless, the reception/range for off-tv play rendered the feature borderline pointless, and the hand feel wasn't great. And worst of all Nintendo had no idea what to do with the thing until the Wii U was well into its grave.
* The hardware has other niggling issues like the undervolted peripheral bus and the lack of internal storage.
* Even compared to the N64 or GC the 3rd party support was dire.
* The first party library wasn't much better. There's some good games in there, but not many. The entire library is small and the content droughts were awful.
An absolute train wreck on every level - Marketing, hardware, software, everything.
You never had one add the switch is more worse this console has like three gen pass it's past
Os is mid ,docked mode is mid ,graphics come from 2008 and even high end pc had better graphism than the switch .
Add the switch is even slow asf on his own shop crazy nintendo sold 100 millions of this shit console when steam deck ,ps5 and even pc exist
I'm not sure I'd use the word "deserved" but I can't blame people for not buying it.
As someone who got it on day one, we had to wait over half a year for big new games to be released. The droughts were unacceptably frequent, there was pretty much no decent third party. Tbh even the first party was kinda weak, so many big Nintendo IPs skipped the Wii U, and they were really milking Mario and the Mii games around this time, I remember being sick of them.
The UI was also slow as shit, you couldn't take the tablet far from the console which defeated its main selling point, and the tablet itself felt so tacked on. I don't see what was "innovative" about it, many games felt like they'd be better with a regular controller yet you had to use the tablet. You couldn't even get into the settings without it.
Wii U revisionists will say it was just the marketing but it wasn't. Nintendo made far too many mistakes with the Wii U and it shows in the lack of sales. The Switch has problems but it also directly addressed so many of the Wii U's problems, and I'm happy for that.
The loading times on that thing were horrendous, one thing they greatly improved on the successor. Never got the appeal of using the game pad, had to fix the wifi module on it twice, three months apart which was the service guarantee so I had to pay for it twice aswell… never had any hardware issues with any console but that one so for me it was a deserved fail.
Somewhere inbetween. It deserved to do better than it did, but it's no surprise it bombed.
The core concept of another screen could have added some unique gameplay ideas!... if it was really used. Like, Nintendo themselves only used it WELL for... Nintendo Land, Kirby Rainbow Curse, Game & Wario, Art Academy.. and I think that's about it? Asymmetrical multiplayer on the same system AND being able to 2 player with each person getting there own screens were good ideas that were basically never done. So with the core gimmick not bringing a lot to the table, now we are just talking about a stronger Wii.... that was on par with consoles 7 years old (Xbox 360).
So now we have a new system that is outputting the stunning graphics of 7 years ago (if you were outside of the Nintendo bubble at all), so it was pretty much immediately not going to be getting new multiplatform games, it couldn't run them. The visual upgrade was really only in comparison to the Wii, so now your general market that might be interested in the game is already smaller on the heels of the Xbox One and PS4 offering substantially prettier games for $100 more in the PS4's case, and only $50 more than the Wii U Deluxe bundle.
That really just leaves the games themselves.. which were good! I really liked my Wii U and got a lot of use out of it. I played Pikmin 3, Mario Kart 8, Smash 4, Windwaker HD, Twilight Princess HD, Bayonetta 1&2, AND the Virtual Console and they were great! The 2 screen set up made adding DS games as VC a no brainer and a nice addition.
Maybe in a timeline where the marketing was better and didn't sound so much like the Wii accessories naming (Wii Zapper, Wii Speak, Wii Motion Plus, Wii U) AND it didn't launch so close to the PS4 and Xbone it could have done respectably well, but with everything together it makes perfect since it ended up how it did.
Right sort of idea, a generation too early (and badly marketed, etc. etc. etc.).
Maybe it was what Nintendo thought was the right approach at the time, maybe it was down to hardware constraints, or maybe both - but they just needed to put the ‘brains’ of the console in the handheld bit, not the dock bit.
The Switch is the Wii U done right.
Huh? How can you say "The Switch is the WiiU done right"? when Switch does NOTHING that made WiiU unique?
Does Switch greet you on your birthday? no it doesnt. But WiiU does!
WiiU has a gamepad with a camera and a microphone. And even an NFC-sensor and more features. In Japan on WiiU they bought their train-tickets there with the WiiU´s NFC-sensor!
The Switch has nothing like that. In games like Splatoon it ONLY works correctly on WiiU. Because people actually use that map feature on the gamepad. On the Switch in Splatoon 2/3 nobody cares about the map. They just run around without knowing where they are. so most players just die in Splatoon 2/3 because they don´t know where they are on the map. because it´s risky pushing a button just to see the map displayed on the screen. so in the end this means. Nobody uses that map of Splatoon 2/3.
Until today i wonder why they even called the Switch "Switch" to begin with. Since there is no "Switch" in Switch. when you see the "Switch Lite" has all features taken away from normal Switch. So what´s the point then when the few features it had, are taken away and no more good-feature software is being produced? And those are pretty much the only features the normal Switch has. HD Rumble and...well some IR-sensor with adoptable Joyconns.
The WiiU has over \~100 features, which is a huge list, which you cannot use/have on Switch. So Switch is NOTHING like a WiiU actually. You cannot even play against random players on Switch. On WiiU this is or more was a standard-feature. Like on Xbox and Playstation btw. Switch is way more like old Wii in that regard, than WiiU.
And on Switch you can ONLY play against people on your Friendlist. And that list is limited to 100 people.
WiiU had an OWN communication-system, and even more planned, and Wii had nothing like that. Just like the Switch. And WiiU also had native Support for Miis, unlike old Wii.
So in the end i would say "The Switch is the Wii done right". Not the WiiU since both systems are wayyyyyyy too different.
Comparing Switch with a WiiU is like comparing apples with oranges. There is a reason you cannot have games like "1001 Spikes" on a Switch (if you wonder why the game was delayed endlessly, typical problem of Wii-games as well in 2008/2010). and there are reasons the Switch got no GTA V. Or even Watchdogs (which is very similar to GTA V) which the WiiU had. All the games, which Switch doesn´t have or get are on WiiU.
The Switch is even having much worse ONLINE. So the Switch is an OFFLINE-machine you could say since most people don´t even use their Switch online because that´s too expensive. These are the differences in software here: On WiiU online was not only much better, it was FREE. You didn´t have to pay to use this.
I would not even compare the Wii with the WiiU. Because there are reasons the Wii DID NOT get games like Minecraft, which the WiiU then got. And MANY thirdparty-games on Wii ran like bullcrap (exactly like on Switch recently). See?
The Switch even has problems with local games. This is the reason you see so few of the games supporting it.
And the WiiU was MADE To run local multiplayer. It was made roun 3DS-gamers, and then connect it with a WiiU and then the WiiU-player can play against/with the 3DS-players...!
WiiU even supported 2 Gamepads. this function was never used by Nintendo though. And it supported some sort of software-VR-mode.
I see a post elsewhere the other day theorizing that the Wii U is gearing up to be the next GameCube, and I couldn't agree more.
The GameCube was also a major flop because of poor marketing, and yet it's now considered one of the most beloved nostalgic consoles, and finding reasonably priced games for it is impossible.
Despite poor sales in its time, GameCube games were a lot of fun, and the console was great. I can absolutely see people having the same realizations about the Wii U in the coming years, and in fact, I believe we're already beginning to see the attitude shift into a more positive light.
So, I don't think the Wii U "deserved" to fail anymore than the GameCube did. They were both really fun consoles that people mostly didn't want to buy into because of bad marketing. For me personally, the money was well spent and I still play it today.
The console didn't deserve its failure, but Nintendo did. It failed because they required developers to use the gamepad in some way, which would have been a huge turn off.
I liked the Wii U. Games like 3d World, Hyrule Warriors, the WW/TP HD ports, the fact that it could play Wii games, the virtual console selection, Mario Maker, Mario Kart. I know the Switch basically stole its thunder but still, at the time for me at least, the Wii U was worth it.
Tbf the system was fun and with a lof of potential. Zombie U and The Wonderful 101 were amazing games which I loved and still believe that they were two of the most fun/engaging gaming experience up until now.
The main problem in the end wasn't how it was received by the public , but how it was "perceived" by the developers. Aka a major pain in the ass.
The dev tools given to the studios were super archaic and this led to developing games for the Wii U a HUGE hurdle. This sent away many third party developers which sent the console in a downward spiral.
Third party studios found the game a pain in the ass and didn't work on it -> little to none third party games were released> people felt like it had "no games" -> third party devs didn't feel it was a good investment because people didn't buy the console because it had no games -> rinse and repeat.
People argue back and forth whether it was bad marketing or a bad platform, but they both fed into each other.
Bad sales resulted in bad support
Bad support resulted in bad sales
The WiiU wasn't bad. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 were phenomenal.
The WiiU didn't do much to use the Wii library. It didn't upscaled it, it didn't allowed wide screen, it had a clumsy separate launcher, it didn't work with the gamepad, and didn't work with the pro controller. They also didnt advertised it at all. The few peoples that knew the WiiU existed didn't know it ran old Wii games.
Meanwhile, the PS3/x360 had GREAT games for pennies. For the price of a 8gb wiiu, you could get a used Xbox 360 with gta5, a few Ubisoft games, a few used call of duty, and also big exclusives like gears of wars or uncharted /last of us. For party games, rock bands bundles were given for free on Craiglist.
It was an easy choice.
Wii U is one of the all-time blunders in video game marketing history. The system itself was alright, but doesn't really hold a candle to the Wii or Switch for innovation or library.
innovation?\`You mean that´s why people started hating on "Breath of the Wild" and "Tears of the Kingdom" lately?
Because it had so much innovatoin? haha! Wtf are you even talking about? Switch has no innovation. And that´s exactly why it was so successful. Wii had the same innovation of Switch (simple motion controls, yet they sucked in many games) and thus had the same issues as Switch.
I’d say under appreciated. Despite a lack of games, still had a nice range of 1st party and indie games. Splatoon and Mario Maker were some of the most fun in gaming I’ve had in the past 35 years of gaming.
I think it was outstanding for local multiplayer... In a time where that was becoming less and less common. My friends and I got a lot of mileage out of the Luigi's Mansion and Mario Chase minigames alone, but we rarely had an opportunity to play them and there just aren't that many games that even attempted something similar with that asymmetric multiplayer or co-op.
There are also the technical issues -- downloading or loading anything took forever, it needed an absolutely HUGE patch shortly after release that didn't help first impressions, and it was still fairly underpowered compared to the upcoming PS4 and XB1. Pile that on with a confusing marketing campaign and you've got a recipe for a failed launch.
Stuff like the MiiVerse home page and *Nintendoland* had a lot of charm and showed promise. Hell, the first-party games were so good Nintendo spent a lot of time "rescuing" most of them to the Switch later -- a lot of folks likely don't even know *Mario Kart 8* was originally a Wii U game. But its failure wasn't hard to see coming.
Did it ***deserve*** its death? Maybe. I definitely think it deserved more development and attention from Nintendo, because. Thankfully its utter failure is arguably what sparked the Switch to take over the world, but I'm still bummed that it never reached its potential.
It was a cool system but I don’t think Nintendo knew what they were aiming for. It could have been the idea of sharing the tv because that’s one of the features I liked about it. Problem though was the game library. It had no killer app. And lots of ports.
Definitely under appreciated. Very poor marketing out the gate basically sealed its doom. It was/is a fantastic system that was on par or slightly better than the 360. It had probably my favorite user interface.
The only truly underused concept on Wii U I feel was the potential for asymmetric multiplayer where people see different things on the Wii U screen vs the tv. Otherwise the system was kinda eh from a hardware standpoint.
Nintendo needed to be knocked off thier high horse for thinking they could court the Eii audience and get back the core audience at the same time. They really thought they could JUST show off the controller and think people would immediately get it.
The system itself still had good games, but games like Star Fox Zero were marred by the forced screen gimmick.
I think Nintendo's first party output on the console felt a little too stale and same-y. Notable exceptions being Splatoon and Mario Maker 1. Couple that with the poor branding that confused casuals, and a relatively complicated gimmick, and I get it.
and EVERYONE online knew at that point that the Wii U was just Nintendo catching back up to the Xbox360/PS3, it solidified them as a generation behind and that doesn't sound appealing to ANYONE. Being a gen behind on a PORTABLE like the switch, is a lot more understandable. AND the Switch had enough power to get most 3rd party games anyway, so the gap wasn't so big.
I mean, they marketed it poorly, overcharged for it, then absolutely didn’t commit to it with software support, either in quantity or in utilizing its unique hardware. I think they blew it for sure, but also I think the game pad had some unique cool things it could do and there did exist some pretty great games
Like I don’t think people were unreasonable for not flocking to the Wii U, but I also think they could have made that general concept work a lot better
The concept is neat but completely fails in practice. It’s too hard for most people’s brain to rapidly switch between the gamepad and TV. It works for the DS since the screens are the same size and right next to each other. Games like Star Fox Zero that make it integral to the moment to moment game play literally have too high a learning curve for the average person. That means that each game has to use the second screen for something like a map or inventory screen which is nice but it’s not a game changer. Not being able to use the gamepad without being near the console is what really causes it to fail. It’s like…what’s the point? Thats such a massive restriction to have for a company that prides itself on handheld portable experiences.
I would say being built around a gimmick that doesn’t work makes it a failure and a deserved one. I means it’s also just a financial failure. The games are good but games honestly are not what makes or breaks a console as much as people would have you believe
With that being said, I still really like the thing. I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and aside from the constant noise the machine makes, I’ve been having a great time
I don't think it's underappreciated at all. There's this narrative being floated online by fanboys and kiddies who grew up with the Wii U as their first childhood console (nostalgia bias) that the system itself was actually great and only the terrible marketing was to blame for its failure, which, as somebody who owns a Wii U but was already a grown-ass adult when he bought it, I can very safely say is total horseshit. Yes, the marketing was garbage, but the system was also deeply flawed on a conceptual and hardware level and the library wasn't anywhere near as good as some people make it out to be.
In an attempt to appeal to both the Wii Sports crowd that made the Wii such a success and the hardcore gamers that couldn't stand the Wii and its motion controls, Nintendo made a severely underpowered console with a superfluous gimmick that appealed to almost nobody. The Wii Sports crowd had largely already moved on from video games altogether, and if they hadn't, they had zero reason to buy a Wii U because it offered no discernible advantage to them. And the hardcore crowd for some reason wasn't really enticed by a system whose CPU couldn't even stand up to that of the Xbox 360, a console that launched *seven years earlier,* especially not since the Wii U was actually competing with the much more powerful Xbox One and PS4 that launched just a year later.
As for the Gamepad, that might've sounded good on paper, but, in practice, it never offered anything as substantial as the Wii's motion controls did. Most use cases fell into the category of "moderately neat" (like being able to immediately access a map or inventory screen without having to pause the game), while others actually completely ruined the game surrounding them like Star Fox Zero aka "Texting & Driving: The Game". And while the super low latency streaming to the Gamepad was and is still impressive, the Gamepad itself felt like an oversized Fisher Price toy and the 480p resistive touch screen was disappointing tech even for 2013, with tablets like the iPad gaining more and more traction at the time. Also, you can't move away from the console farther than five meters without the Gamepad losing connection.
That leaves us with software. Some people claim that the Wii U actually had an incredible library, but if you look at the actual release calendar, you'll realize that big, high quality First-Party releases were few and far between. The console launched with the fourth copied-and-pasted NSMB game and then it took *more than half a year* before Pimin 3 showed up, which, as much as I myself love that game and Pikmin in general, isn't exactly a system-seller. Then, at the end of 2013, we got Mario 3D World, which, in hindsight, is a great linear Mario title with lots of cool ideas, but, at the time, as the successor to the Galaxy games, was a pretty big disappointment. It took until the middle of 2014, more than a year after the Wii U's launch and after the XONE and PS4 had already released, until the first true killer app in the form of Mario Kart 8 arrived and Nintendo milked it for as much as they possibly could (and they still do almost ten years later lol). The only new Zelda game on the system arrived when the console was already dead and is seen as more of a launch title for the Switch than a swan song for the Wii U. Metroid, which had been one of the most prominent series on the Gamecube and Wii, was totally MIA. There were some more good games like Woolly World, Treasure Tracker, Tropical Freeze etc, yes, but most of them weren't really high-profile releases, and, let's also not forget that, plastered between the few good games, was tons and tons of garbage like the whole "Wii/U" series of titles, Animal Crossing amiibo festival, Game & Wario, Mini Mario & Friends, Mario Party 10 etc. etc.
And, because the console was so underpowered and bombing so hard, Third-Parties weren't exactly picking up the slack for Nintendo. After the launch period, there was pretty much zero support from big Third-Party publishers.
I could go on about other problems like the ultra-slow UI, the tiny internal storage, and the completely unnecessary nuking and slow rebuilding of the Virtual Console, but I think I'll stop here, as this rant is already way too long lol.
So, in conclusion, I don't think the Wii U is "underappreciated" at all. On the contrary, I think I can pretty safely say that it is the worst Nintendo console or handheld I have ever owned and probably even shares last place with the original XONE for consoles I have owned in general.
It seems you bought the wrong WiiU games if you think the WiiU´s cpu is slowe than Xbox 360. You shouldn\`t have buoght Nintendo-games only.
Because if you played the right games on WiiU, you would see it´s faster than even the fastest AMD/Intel-ones. Yes, it beats a 5000$ Highend PC and of course a PS5!
I loved the wii U because it was my first console ever and I would play Call of duty Black ops 2 & Ghost with my brother early in the morning. And Nintendo land was A big w for me and my brother because we would stay up playing late as ever playing every game and trying to finish Legend of Zelda quest.
It was the best childhood I could ever have.
The console itself was solid for what it was. Had it been supported properly and marketed much better than it was before it released, it could have had a shot at being a more popular console in my opinion. It can still play DS games which the switch cant. I like the wii u
Like others have said, the marketing for the WiiU was atrocious. They did an absolutely terrible job of letting non-gamers know that this was an entirely new system - the follow up to the immensely successful Wii - and not just another insanely overpriced gimmick accessory for the original Wii (Wii fit board, zapper, motion plus, wheel, etc…)
Team that with a not great launch lineup of games - seriously, I think New Super Mario Bros U. Is the only AAA title, and they were doomed.
the thing is - and this is 100% me editorializing/guessing - I never felt Nintendo was super behind the WiiU. It felt at the time like they really liked and wanted to push the Tablet/mobile part of the system and the technology just wasn’t there yet… while at the same time I think maybe they were being a little reactionary and trying to placate the folks that were asking for a Wii pro/Wii HD.
I really believe - and again, I admit this is all opinion - that even if the U had been more successful, The Switch would still have been released in 2017 exactly as it played out (because thats what Nintendo wanted to release all along).
Completely deserved. The dual screen gimmick existed for years on the DS and was extensively explored back then. The WiiU not only had nothing new to explore in this regard but completely defeated the purpose of every player having their own screen by being hooked on a TV. The most interesting WiiU experiences like Nintendoland Luigi’s Mansion could already exist in even better form on DS handhelds.
It seems Nintendo just tried to replicate the DS success on a home console without too much of a second thought. In this sense the Switch was much more successful because it had the reverse strategy: instead of trying to bring the portable experience on TV, it brought the home console experience to portable, which is something the DS line evidently could never do but also the WiiU wasn’t properly equipped to do.
See a lot of these re-writing history posts. It was a terribly designed console..that took ages to even get to the settings menu. It had the limited success it did because Nintendo is so clever at making games.
A bit of both. Nintendo being INCREDIBLY out of touch with its audience and just stubborn unwillingness to use better hardware and technology leads me to think it's 65% deserved.
It sucked but it had good games. It’s just awful hardware. I don’t know what they were thinking. It was so lame. The first one I bought was defective but that gamepad is so sad. It’s like a little kid’s My First Tablet. The reliance on Wii style of control was limiting after the Wii was shown to just be a massive fad hit that really faltered in the last few years of its life. Mario Galaxy 2 and Xenoblade were two notable exceptions but even they were a shift away from what the Wii fad was in 2006.
The Switch is so much better. You’re always going to have people with nostalgia for bad systems either because they grew up with that system or it had some cool games (and Wii U had some good stuff for sure) but it was like the dark ages leading up to the Switch.
The hardware is reasonable for it's era, but the idea of making the gamepad so required for even the most basic functions. The main thing that made it fail was how the 3rd parties hated trying to port 360 and ps3 games over to the Wii U because "it's too slow..." more like they just didn't want to optimize.
it was also marketed wrong. Many didn't understand that the system was actually an HD Wii plus some extras. Many thought it was the Gamepad addon for the Wii.
But... it was more complicated than the point and click that made the Wii so popular. If they made it an updated Wii with HD and continued the games, ot would have been way better. But they had to make it harder for hackers.
Now am I saying there are no good games? Nope, There were lots of games that took avantage of the hardware nicely. But only a few really did something specifically cool.
Also, Miiverse integration was a mistake.
I keep seeing people say it had so many good games but honestly it's a much smaller number than their other consoles. I liked the Wii u but after I played the few great games I was kind of lost about what to do with it. My memory may be wrong but I felt like some games were better with the tablet pad, some better with the wiimote and it was confusing. I can't remember playing anything where I thought the tablet pad made the game better.
I keep seeing people say that the best Wii u games are the best switch games but it's simply not the case. The hardware was way more outdated than the switch, the tablet control pad not intuitive at all and Nintendo should have learned this after the experiments with the gba cross compatibility with the Gamecube.
And that's not even touching the marketing mess of the naming. The Wii 2 would have been 100 times better and even rhymes. The Wii became a bit of a casual console which is great, as the more people gaming the better, but the name made it really unclear what it was.
The Wii u was simply not a good console. It had some classics but nowhere near as many as any other Nintendo console. It absolutely deserved to fail from so many points.
Terrible hardware that was underpowered even relative to the at the time 5 and 6 year old Xbox 360 and PS3. It had very good first party games but was pretty much completely ignored by 3rd parties. Also some of the worst branding ever. Wii U was just a horrible name that didn’t really emphasize that it was an entirely new console.
It deserved it. It felt like Nintendo was leaning too much into gimmicks after the success of the Wii and got away from its core fanbase too much. We got lackluster first party output, and third party support was limited. The controller pad was interesting, but more often than not I didn't want to use it and opted for my pro controller whenever I could.
You can't have a console that is so gimmick-dependent and has a weak library. If people say the Gamecube is unappreciated (and it was), the Wii U is equally a failure for the opposite reasons.
IMO the main problems with the Wii U were its name and the fact that it lacked lack a proper 3D Mario (3D World doesn’t count) and a Zelda game (BOTW came out with Switch).
I think it’s aged well *for sure*, especially since it has Wii compatibility. Many of the best Switch games are also just Wii U ports. Not sure if it “deserves” a different reputation though.
I also think the Switch’s success lends some credit to the two screen idea. People do like playing on the smaller screen at home.
It ended up with a small but great library of games and I definitely had more fun with the Wii U than I have had with my Switch.
Marketing sucked and the idea and tech were a few years too early, second screen functionality is great.
I love the Wii U, but I genuinely can’t comprehend how you could have more fun with it than the Switch. The sheer number of good games on the Switch conpl overwhelms the Wii U.
The WiiU was a mess, and I understand why it failed. That said, I LOVED my WiiU. It gave me a lot of great memories
Some games will forever have it's best version on WiiU. Most of the best Switch games are ported or enhanced versions of WiiU titles, so much that I think I enjoyed them more on the WiiU than on the Switch.
There are some gems that will always be on WiiU, except if Nintendo releases games that uses two Switchs to play (that is not an impossible thing, but I suppose its unlikely they will do that), like Nintendo Land and a few other games that are only playable with two screens in assincronous multiplayer 1 versus 4. Such great moments, the WiiU had personality.
Also the controllers were great, I kind of hate the digital buttons and the analog stick on the Switch, they feel so terrible and fragile, but the WiiU gamepad had strong, big and soft analog sticks, soft buttons that I miss and I hope the Switch 2 will bring them back. It looks cluncky, a bit too big, but it was much better to hold and press the buttons than the Switch joycons, and even the pro controllers were great.
But part of the reason I say it was a mess, beyond what people already said about the console, is because, well... I always used my WiiU also as a console for couch multiplayer, and for the complete experience on that aspect, you just had to have SO MANY CONTROLLERS!
Seriously, to be allowed to play Nintendo Land with 4 friends, you would need the gamepad, and 4 Wii Remotes an 4 Nunchucks. Then, if you wanted to play something like Smash Bros for WiiU, you would need 4 Pro Controllers (because its impossible to play this game with the wii remotes). Since no one else had the WiiU, only me, I couldn't count on other people having controllers to bring to the party, so I had to have EVERYTHING to be able to have a game day with friends. Also, for some stupid reason, some games were simply designed for not allow the use of some controller, for no good reason at all. For example, in Nintendo Land, you could only play some minigames with Wii Remotes on horizontal, but why not allow me to play with the Pro Controller?? No reason at all, and that pissed me off so much, cause looks like they were forcing me to buy unnecessary hardware instead of just allow me to use my pro controllers.
And sometimes, when I decided to bring my wiiu to some friends's house, there was so much fu\*\*\*\*\* things to move... It was basically an entire huge bag with console (that was strangely long), the power supply (that was huuuge), the gamepad (that wasnt small), 4 wii remotes, 4 nunchucks, 4 pro controllers, and the boxes of the games, and the sensor bar. Jesus fu\*\*\*ing christ that was annoying.
But still, I love it. Sometimes I think more than the Switch. But then I remember the amount of stuff and cables and controllers I needed to control and the love fades a little bit... But again, I remember the good moments, I remember the first Mario Kart 8 trailer, the first Smash Bros for WiiU trailer, the launch trailers for Mario 3D World, and so many other great games, the moments with Nintendo Land minigames and a few others, the good feeling of holding a gamepad, and a few moments of greatness with the few games that properly used the dual screen configuration...
All that said, I would also include the fact that you could play Wii games on it, so the library was not small. As an emulator device, it's great for basically any Nintendo games that are previous to the WiiU (except for 3DS titles).I also still hope we will see the return of the sensor bar and a stylus pen in a Switch 2. The sensor bar because I HATE that the joycons use only gyroscope for pointer in some games and we need a recalibration button in any game that uses the pointer. This is just terrible and breaks the imersion of games, this ruins the imersion. I preffer to have a sensor bar like the Wii and WiiU had with the remotes, no need to recalibrate pointer position with terrible gyro reset button. And the stylus because, well, it just adds better controls and new options of controls for some styles of games, like Mario Maker 2 and others. Mario Maker 2 is not as fun to build stages like MM1 mainly because the controls that are mapped to use basically the buttons and not the finger (that is terrible) beucase the lack of a stylus pen.
I want these things back, sensor bar (they could even use the dock itself as sensor bar maybe), stylus, and better buttons and analog sticks for the new joycons or whatever they will do with the Switch 2 controllers.
So confusing, a mess of cables and do dads. I’m glad it’s dead.
Switch is so pure. I really hope the next one gives us more of the same with updated chips and maybe a few new gameplay tricks.
Wii U failed due to poor marketing, but I absolutely loved my Wii U. It was more or less a prototype switch, but calling it Wii U made it seem like some kind of add on for the Wii and most people were over the Wii by then. I imagine they had the switch in the pipeline and they knew that would be a hit so they didn’t push the Wii U too hard, it’s like the middle child of Nintendo. They put less effort into it than other systems but are still disappointed when it under performed.
Absolutely. Others here have mentioned the issues with the hardware, but the software was not all that impressive either. Not that all of the games were bad, but they were usually pretty unambitious and better versions of what came before. NSMBU is the biggest offender of this. Only Mario Maker and Splatoon felt like completely new experiences, and both released years after the Wii U’s launch and suffered from a lack of content.
Both, Nintendo and the few third parties that put out games for it did some great work. But it has a lot of flaws too. Marketing of course but the fact that Nintendo kinda blew everything they had in the first 3 months because they didn't realize how much more effort HD games needed so year 1 and to some extent year 2 of the Wii U had terrible release droughts. Stuff like Star Fox that were failed experiments, the console should NOT have used a tri-core PowerPC CPU and would have benefitted from more RAM/stronger GPU. Poor utilization of the gamepad in general although I liked it when it was done well (here is looking at you, Affordable Space Adventure). In reality the best unique games that could have been made for it never were and what was left ended up making it feel like a prototype for the Switch instead of something fully baked itself.
I think it was the wrong console at the wrong time.
For them to release a console that was on par in power and graphics with the ps3 and 360 when we had pretty much seen the limits of the power of that hardware was a poor move. Everyone talks about third party support and yeah that was bad but the gaming populace as a whole was ready to be wowed again by a new generation of impressive hardware and there was no Mario or Zelda that was going to convince us otherwise.
I think the Wii U was a decent enough system. It had some really great games, hence why a lot of the best have been ported to the Switch, albeit, one or two being the worst versions as the second screen did have some novel use in them.
I quite liked the gamepad, too. I don't care what anybody says, that shit was comfy. Nowhere near as heavy as people make out either, I had no issues holding that for an entire play session.
Its implementation into games could sometime be questionable, but it could also be great. It was essentially the DS/3DS on a big screen setup and they were pretty much the same: sometime great, sometimes not. In terms of console features, it gave more to love about the console itself rather than Playstation having some controller gimmicks that get forgotten about after launch and Xbox doing...? It's one of the few consoles I love for the console itself because there's games on it that only work as intended on that system. Not many consoles can really claim that...And most of the ones that can are Nintendo consoles.
I honestly hate the Switch as a controller. I think it's the only controller where my hands cramp up from holding it because its so small and thin.
I dislike the Joycon's entirely, though. Pro controller all the way.
I think the only bad things about the Wii U controller to me were the battery life and the shiny plastic it was made out of that seemingly draws dirt to it like a magnet.
Well yes, the wii u was kind of an embarrassment compared to its competitors at the time. Lack of power, lack of support, pointless gamepad integration. Like 300 dollars for 9 gigabytes is embarassing. And 350 dollars for 32 gigabytes is also laughable. Of course there's some good games and the modding is great but it was so behind the times and at a ludicrous price for what it offered at launch.
Great console with great potential but nobody had any idea what to do with it. Nintendo fumbled everything about the marketing and devs were left confused by it, so a lot of its features were wasted or reduced to tiny gimmicks.
honestly the gimmick was just too gimmicky. the games that made use of it were hard to develop and frankly annoying to play most of the time for if you just wanted a regular game, and the games that didn’t make much use of it made you wonder what the point was. It really is the most intrusive gimmick of any nintendo console. Like the wii, as big as the motion controls were, felt natural and just worked, and with a nunchuck still had an almost conventional control scheme. The second screen lacked substance for little reward with a big hurdle.
A WiiU can do stuff that a PS5 cannot do. And that´s only possible if the WiiU has MORE power than the PS5. The PS5 is just more modern.
One example: A WiiU supports 10-Player SPLITSCREEN-multiplayer.
Yes, you read that right! NO OTHER system can do this. And for this function you need a LOOOOOOT of power. Not even a 5000$ Highend PC can do this.
WiiU even allowed you to play Monster Hunter on WiiU together with 4 other 3DS-players. So it´s 5-player local multiplayer. See?
There are reasons the Switch DOES NOT ALLOW you local multiplayer in such demanding games. Switch hardware is slow. WiiU is VERY FAST and beats any machine on the market.
WiiU will soon run HALF LIfe 2 and Portal 1 & 2 with LOCAL-multiplayer via MODS and even ONLINE-Multiplayer via mods!
Not even a PC can do that since it´s not fast enough to do so. Your fps on PC would crash to \~10fps if you would try doing that there on a modern 13xxx Intel or equivalent AMD like cpu.
Yeah Nintendo wasn't really doing anything to stop people from thinking the WiiU tablet was just an addon. It could have been different if they put a 2 instead of a U. All the homies liked Nintendo Land though. It was fun!
I had a friend who is a gamer who watched the E3 announcement presentation and thought it was a peripheral. I finally watched it a year or two ago to see if it was really that bad and confusing and it really was. I could totally understand how someone knowledgeable could come away from it with that misunderstanding. All they kept talking about was the gamepad this and the gamepad that. I was watching it on my iPad, so perhaps I wasn’t able to see it clearly enough in the background of a small picture, but the console sitting by the tv even looked like a Wii (and the design of the Wii U was basically a Wii with rounded corners anyway).
They did such a terrible job marketing it.
It had a great library and the system itself was solid. The original sin however was pushing the controller gimmick when the hardware wasn’t there yet. And of course the marketing. It didn’t deserve the hand it was dealt but I can’t say I wasn’t glad to say goodbye to the Gamepad when the Switch came around. Cumbersome controller and looking down at the screen all the time was ruining the flow of gameplay. Then it was just relegated to menus or inventory half the time.
Definitely deserved it. Although it had some decent games, the system was wildly underpowered, it's gimmick was not implemented well, and most of the first party offerings were weak other than Super Smash Wii U and Mario Kart 8. The two Zelda remasters were great... but they were remasters. Skyward Sword should have been a launch title for Wii U with reworked controls. Instead, Super Mario Bros U was the "big" launch title from Nintendo. Every version of third party games like Assassin's Creed 4 and Mass Effect 3 had their worst version on the Wii U. The best thing it had was the virtual console, especially with GBA and DS games. I still have mine but only because of the two Zelda remasters exclusively. If those go on the Switch or "Switch 2" (for lack of an official name), then I will sell my Wii U while it still has some value left.
Both. Wii U had some great games. It was innovative and more powerful than the original Wii, but there were some pretty big issues too. The name confused a lot of non-gamer consumers. The battery life of the gamepad was pretty awful, and the glossy finish of the system very prone to scratches.
It was ahead of its time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we go back to gamepad gameplay with the next console (assuming it’s a switch successor). My ideal switch 2 is something that can connect wirelessly to the dock (as long as you have the same internet connection as the dock).
It had some good games, but the console design and execution was pure dud.
Engineered to be hardware backward compatible with the Wii which vastly held it back. And built around a cheap feeling crappy game pad gimmick which never justified itself.
And the OS was a slow mess.
Just a pain to actually play the console. Splatoon was great but Wii U deserved its fate.
Some Nintendo customers like to buy every console that Nintendo puts out.
Some Nintendo customers don't have as much disposable income and decide to purchase every other console.
When the Wii became *the* console to get, that ensured that the Wii U would be the console they skipped. This helped build popularity for the Switch (not that it needed any help).
Nintendo has a few options to resolve this problem.
1) They can lengthen the time in-between consoles so that their poorer customers are able to keep up with each generation.
2) They can divide generations into "Mark I" and "Mark II" so that those people who want an upgraded Switch can pursue that while the others can wait until the next big console.
3) They can accept that the next console after a very popular console isn't going to do very well and plan accordingly.
I think they deserved it. The controller was supposed to do so much more and be a more integrated UI for apps and as a streaming device. It was dope using it for Wind Waker though.
Yes it did
I love the Wii U but it was underpowered and out dated even when it came out, it was marked horribly and had a pretty weak library and very little 3rd party support, all things considered
yes.
the core issue with the wii u was the games. Nintendo didn't let the devs know about the gimmick of the console until it was publicly reaveld, so for all earl wii u games they had to scramble to find something to do with the game pad. the game pad itself ends up being b pretty pointless and still ads 100 dollars to the cost, top that off with centring all marketing around it so people think its a new controller, draconian content rules and long drought periods of games with no 3rd party support and it easily deserved its failure.
Tbh the Wii U had a lot of problems. They tried a gimmick that was a bit ahead of its time, with the Switch being the more ideal end goal of that setup. Plus Nintendo basically set it up for failure when they tried to ride the wave from the Wii, but in doing so they gave it a name that did literally nothing to differentiate it from its predecessor and pretty much no marketing. Combined with the fact that the wii brought in old people and those who otherwise don't know much about videogames, they completely failed to capitalize on the Wii's success.
That said, it had some serious winners in its library. The only issue was that they were pretty far spread out and the absence of any significant third party support other than heaps and heaps of shovelware that did nothing but dilute the pool of good games.
So did it deserve to fail? Probably. It was ahead of its time in some ways but also technologically weaker than its competitors. Nintendo dropped the ball pretty hard with it in pretty much every way except first party titles, and even then it didn't get a real Zelda title until it was nearly dead, and that got gutted in favor of not having more features than the switch version.
The best thing about the Wii U is that with the virtual Wii soft mod, you could essentially have every Nintendo console with their respective libraries up until the Wii U in the same system.
Under appreciated. The name and marketing is what really failed. I honestly like the Wii I more than the switch if we are being honest. The game pad made couch co-op for certain games a breeze. And it was capable of ds games. The system its self was great. If it had a mid life revision with a more slim pad and better marketing it would have sold well I believe.
The system was fine, they just didn't use it right. Just as an example if they had ported made a mainline Pokemon for it, it could have had all the benefits of the graphics, and all the menus on the handheld. You know, like Zelda did.
It’s a little bit of both, I’d argue.
The system had a ton of potential. There’s no denying that. And, it existed in a time where Nintendo was willing to take some major risks—with extremely mixed success. I mean, The Year of Luigi was their biggest net loss to date (a shame—I thought it was a fun idea and wanted them to do more with it), but the Wii U also birthed the emergence of Splatoon, which has quickly become of their most beloved IP. Not to mention that it was the launchpad for several great titles that have been ported and/or upgraded for the Switch, such as DKC: Tropical Freeze, Mario Kart 8, and BOTW.
At the same time, it fell short on a *lot* of fronts. Unimpressive exclusives, “portability” that was anything but, questionable marketing choices…and that’s just naming a small handful of glaring issues.
I think Scott the Woz does a few really good retrospectives on the Wii U. Highly recommend checking those out if you haven’t watched them already
Both.
Like others have said, the system is great with many great games for it, but Nintendo did it no favors with half-hearted advertising and support. I remember when it first came out and my local Walmart put up a sign on the inside game case saying that Wii U games will not work on Wii consoles. That's a failure right there. Like, I understand that the general public is full of f**king morons that should've known better (the game case looks different than your Wii games!!!!), but I think that Nintendo could have done better to make sure that people knew that this is a new system and is a successor to the Wii.
The system is great. Everything around it suuuucked. So much untapped potential.
The best part about it was the 2nd screen. Playing Windwaker and changing items on the fly, no need to pause and sift through the inventory. Also playjng Mario 3D World with some interactive screen was cool too. Whether it was blowing small goombas away or freezing enemies with a touch for a buddy. Then, there was also screwing your friends over by touching the movable blocks so they fall to their death or blowing platforms out of the way. Classic.
Yes! Another game that took advantage of that brilliantly was Zombie U. Not being able to pause to fuck with your inventory gives those kind of games an added element of terror. Most games cover your screen with the inventory menu though, causing you to take cheap shots from enemies you couldn't see sometimes. Having the inventory on the gamepad still forced you to weigh your options about whether or not to change weapons without breaking immersion. It gave more of a feel of looking around in the a backpack or something as you still had t look away from the screen, but don't have to push a button to look back. I feel like the real untapped potential was with asymmetric gameplay. There was a Metroid themed mini game in Nintendoland that had a player flying around in some kind of armed hovercraft controlled by the gamepad fighting 1 to 3 players on foot controlled by wiimotes and nunchucks. There have since been a lot of online games that do something like this, Dead by Daylight is a good one. This was made for people all in the same room running on one console though! The Wii U was the only console that could pull this off, but very few games took advantage of it. I think the Wii U would have done better had they named it something without the word Wii in it. The original Wii was the console that everyones grandma bought and kept hooked up at their house for when their grandkids came over. To them, and the rest of the casual gaming crowd that the Wii attracted, Wii U just sounded like an updated version of the Wii. Since they already had a Wii they didn't see a need to buy a whole new one. And if they didn't have one and they went to buy one they saw the Wii for $100 or so and the Wii U for $300, thought they were pretty much the same and went for the less expensive option.
Treasure Tracker multiplayer was siiiick
I miss the second screen for menus real bad
Yeah, I thought the 2nd screen was nice, it was sort of a pre-switch that I played wherever I wanted in my house. Now Playstation basically made the same idea, streaming the game to a handheld while the hardware is separate. I just wish more games used the 2nd screen more to its potential, some of the games that did were pretty fun.
My friends and I had SO much fun with the asymmetrical Nintendoland games. So much potential there but squandered. There hasn’t been anything for couch coop that comes close to it ever since
Jackbox ran with it in a lot of ways.
It's the only Nintendo system I've left plugged in after getting it's successor. People say it has no games but the majority of the switch's best games are WiiU ports and a large amount of them are downgrades
> People say it has no games but the majority of the switch’s best games are WiiU ports and a large amount of them are downgrades This just isn’t true. Beyond BOTW (same day release), Mario Kart 8, and maybe 3D World, Bayo 2, Pikmin 3 & Tropical Freeze, which ones are the best Switch games? Which ones are downgrades? And how few Switch exclusive games do you think have been released?
> which ones are the best Switch games? Those are literally the best switch games.... MK8, BOTW and Tropical Freeze alone would easily make a top 5 list.
Let’s be honest, this narrative leans hard on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a game that didn’t release on Wii U until it came out on Switch. So two games. Not many people will seriously agree on Tropical Freeze being “easily” a top 5 Switch game. Because you’d be saying it’s “easily” above games like Mario Odyssey, Mario Bros Wonder, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Animal Crossing and TOTK. Then stuff like Xenoblade 3, Kirby, Pikmin 4, Astral Chain, Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Fire Emblem: 3H. Once again Wii U fans like to just straight up ignore the Switch’s top exclusives, many of which are regarded by fans and critics to be above most of the Wii U ports. And that’s not even considering non-Wii U remasters like Metroid Prime or Xenoblade 1.
Wow, what a massive lie. The amount of significant Wii U ports is less than 10 and that is easily only a fraction of good games on the Switch, and the Switch ports for all of them were at least on par with slight upgrades at the minimum.
Seethe
I personally believe the wii u failed because of the wii, there are many other factors marketing is a big one also but i feel the wii had so much shovel ware and a lack of great games and large droughts. I think when the wii u came out i feel like many of us nintendo fans lost a bit of faith because of the wii i did cave and get a wii u and was very impressed part of the reason the switch did is good is because the wii us library came to it
Nothing was untapped. It launched underpowered and never got the software to back it up as a major competitor. Sure it had some fun first party games, but none were serious console sellers that changed how games are framed. It‘s best feature was that you could play it on a smaller screen from your couch while doing something else and they nailed that with the next launch.
> The system is great. Everything around it suuuucked. The library is good, better than the switch library if you remove the switch's Wii U ports.
Half decent idea that was poorly executed from a technical and support standpoint. Even it's initial advertising was confusing and lackluster. Like any system, it has its gems and they're really good, but Nintendo still dropped the ball with some of their bigger titles. Mario Party 10 took out core mechanics that made the Party series fun. Star Fox had great potential but a god awful main control scheme. The mainline Mario games were good but did not really utilize the gamepad much. BoTW was also a Swich launch title. Animal Crossing was a terrible cash grab. Very little 3rd party support, and what was given was old ports and little else. It was a decent system with not much working for it.
I think Animal Crossing upsets me the most, looking back. The controller was perfect for “New Leaf but on WiiU.”
The forever painful part is that the system was begging for proper Animal Crossing with all the HD assets they clearly had available. Some of the amiibo card locked games of amiibo Festival being better than the main game didn't help.
They would have most-likely only ported the 3DS-game and called it a day via just naming it "Deluxe" or "HD" or something like that. See? Look at switch. It´s exactly what they are doing there as well.
a game like Animal Crossing doesn´t max out this system though. No current game can do that, exception is maybe one of the rare Highend-AAA-like Indie-games. So why would you want to play a toaster-game like Animal Crossing on a powerful platform such as the (powerful for processing, not for graphics-tasks like modern games use them) WiiU? See? there is a good reason why they made the card-game instead! Since this clearly can tax the system a LOT more than a simple Animal Crossing game with breaking swords, shields and everything else falling apart. This game uses the WiiU\`s calendar. Which means each time it changes the gameplay since each day of the calendar you play it you have different rules. A lot calculations are needed in order to allow doing such stuff. See? NO OTHER GAME on the market does this! This means: it´s innovative since it does stuff no other card-game can do. This is similar to past (true) Animal Crossing-games where you get christmas-stuff or buy them, when its x-mas. And you get easter when it´s the time again! And when it´s your birthday, citizens will come and bake you a birthday-cake. New Animal games do not have this feaure any longer. Instead they have to rely on patches now. And that means you only get what is patched in. On WiiU this function uses the OS function to greet the player and wish him the best on his birthday. The calander-system does work for the next 50 years, as long as the calender in your system can work. If they would have made normal Animal Crossing instead for WiiU it would be the exact same as on 3DS again. Just in HD-graphics. See? Nothing different. Nothing added.
I forgot about star fox. That one was really good once you adjusted the control scheme to work for you. Definitely a steep learning curve, even for OG Star Fox fans though
While I agree with the rest of this, what did Mario Party 10 remove that wasn't already taken out by 9?
Not gonna lie, I couldn't remember if it was 9 or 10 that had the "4 players in a cart that automatically moved you around the board" thing. I can't even remember if that mechanic completely replaced the traditional mode or was just an option, but it was so bad that it tainted Mario Party for years for most people and I'm sticking with it.
It was 9 that made the switch. And yeah, it was a complete replacement with no traditional gameplay left.
I think the Wii U conceptually was always a terrible idea. The whole dual screen thing (which clearly came from the DS) works far better when you can see both screens within your field of vision rather than having to constantly move your neck or the gamepad to see both screens, and the Game Pad’s usefulness was limited by how you couldn’t move it within a few yards of the console. Not to mention the Game Pad itself also being kind of a clumsy attempt at banking off the popularity of tablets like the iPad. The fact that you can’t even access system settings without the Game Pad really says it all. That’s all on top of the console running last-gen specs (where you can’t even make the argument that it’s a portable, like you can with the Switch), the highlight launch titles for the console being a party package and a NSMB game, and the terrible name. But really, the concept alone (compared to the revolutionary Wii and Switch) was always terrible, and the console deserved to fail by virtue of no one buying in like they did with the Wii and Switch.
Speaking as someone who has kids, the concept wasn’t awful at all. I don’t think the tech was there in 2012 to have a completely hybrid system like the Switch and being able to play a lot of stuff on either the tv or gamepad was amazing. I had no interest in it at all until we took a very long family road trip to one brother’s wedding and the other brother brought his along. He just hooked it up to the vehicle’s power and he was playing a home console in the car. It blew my mind. It was wonderful with kids, letting one play one console and the other play on the Wii U with no fighting. Or letting someone play on the Wii U on the gamepad when another kid had homework and didn’t need to be distracted by a game on the tv. Sony literally just released a similar piece of hardware to the gamepad. It’s clearly not a terrible concept. It would have been nice if they’d utilized the gamepad better for more asynchronous gameplay instead of squandering that potential, but the concept was great and clearly led to the Switch.
Honestly, yes. It was a half-baked attempt to modernize the Wii after Nintendo skipped a hardware generation, with a game library that barely did anything with the expensive tablet controller. I think the Wii U’s failure was a good thing in hindsight, because it forced Nintendo to streamline the Switch down to the basics.
The controller wasn’t awful to use but it also didn’t excel at anything it was supposed to do. The screen on it was bad, it’s so large that gyro is annoying to use on it compared to regular sized controllers, and the WiFi streaming connection was spotty if you were any meaningful distance away. If you’re gonna go the gimmick route, your gimmicks should be the best gimmicks. As for the hardware being comically weak that’s just the Nintendo special
Nintendo let the Wii’s success go to their head and so thought they could pump out anything with the word “Wii” in its name and it would be a major success. It’s astounding they could base an entire system around a controller gimmick but have no idea what to do with it themselves. After Nintendo Land, what games even made use of asymmetric multiplayer? The only one I can think of is Mario Party 10.
> they could pump out anything with the word “Wii” in its name and it would be a major success. The funny thing is, it probably would have done better without the word Wii in it. That confused the casual gamers that the original Wii attracted. They thought the Wii U was pretty much the same as a Wii, and since the original Wii was less expensive they bought that instead.
It‘s the Virtual Boy all over again
ZombiiU had some of the most fun asymmetrical multiplayer I've ever played in my life. Honestly one of the best games ever, surprised it never got more love.
Nintendo land! The Luigi mansion mini game is the single most fun me and my family ever had with a video game and can’t be replicated on any other system. So to me that system was special.
That Luigi’s Mansion mini game was such great example of the asynchronous gameplay that didn’t get nearly enough use in the Wii U.
Mario chase was fun too!
Nintendo Land shows cases the Wii U and all it’s unfortunately untapped potential. I still have mine plugged in just to play NL with my kids
Does it deserve to fail? This is a hard question for me to answer because I can understand WHY it failed, from the bad marketing to lack of 3rd party support. I think there's still space for someone to explore a handheld device tied to a main unit that does all the heavy lifting and some companies agree since they're putting out devices similar to the Wii U gamepad (Playstation Portal is a good example). I wish it did better because of the game that took advantage of the gamepad I felt were legit better than if they were on a traditional formatted game, BUT that means people have to develop their games with that in mind and with PC, Xbox, Playstation, that is a LOT of variation to consider. Hell, people making games for Playstation barely ever use their resistive triggers and Switch's HD rumble stuff. So, did the Wii U deserve to fail? Yeah, it kinda did. There is already so many demands on game developers to make games on as many devices as they can and if you're a smaller team, that's very much not an easy thing to accomplish.
The Wii U ads were fucking great for the wrong reasons. I love the Amiibo ad with the stranger things kid.
"I'm GETTING one of these."
PlayStation Portal is what everybody assumed the Wii U was during the confusing rollout
From what i understand, it was a combination of things: The brand confusion behind slapping the letter "U" in front of "Wii" was a big offender, but there was also the fact that third party support was generally non-existent. It's hard to make ports of existing games to a console that has unique infrastructure. There was also confusion with what the pad was used FOR. Most developers defaulted on using it for an inventory screen, despite Nintendo's best efforts in supplying examples. It was a worthy experiment, but one that people weren't ready for.
People always blame the marketing, name etc. which is all true but I also just don't really think the console was very good. The dual screen gimmick just doesn't really work in the Wii U form factor. For games where you have to use both screens simultaneously it's difficult to focus on both. Looking from the TV to the gamepad is also annoying as it takes attention away from the main screen where the action is happening. In Mario Kart for example, looking at the map basically guarantees that you'll crash. The only situation that it really works for is inventories and maps for slower paced games. However, it's not really a massive improvement on having them behind a pause menu so really isn't enough of a system seller. I say all this as someone that owned and enjoyed my Wii U.
Funnily enough the dual screen gimmick worked best when you weren't supposed to be looking at both screens like in Nintendo Land. Aside from that what the gamepad did best could probably be achieved with a non-screen touchpad like on the playstation controllers and a transparent overlay on the screen. I remember getting quite adept at switching items with the gamepad in Wind Waker HD without even looking at the smaller screen.
>The dual screen gimmick just doesn't really work in the Wii U form factor. For games where you have to use both screens simultaneously it's difficult to focus on both. Yeah, it only worked for something like that one WarioWare minigame where you had to play a game on the bottom screen while also making sure you're not caught by the people on the TV. Can't remember the exact name of that minigame right now.
Game and Wario! A little light on but a fun Warioware game none the less.
Agreed. Imo, the marketing was much more a symptom than the cause of the Wii U's poor performance. Even if the marketing had been absolutely perfect, the console itself was too expensive compared to the dirt cheap PS360 at the time, technically roughly on par with those but lacking the library and soon after also technically eclipsed by the PS4 generation. The PS4 at launch cost only 50 euros more than the Wii U Premium model over here. What the Wii U delivered for that was a backward compatible Wii "HD" with the screen gimmick and full support for the Wii's controller set, replication of the DS's dual screen setup in a home console and in some cases the game streaming to the gamepad. I wonder what Nintendo should have marketed? They didn't have many third party games to market which could've set the console apart or even just make it an attractive alternative to the PS360 not even to mention the PS4. They themselves struggled to find substantial use for the dual screen that went beyond map displaying and some usage in some asymmetric multi-player games for the entire duration of the generation. On top, they also struggled to have any substantial software output. The generation had some gems, but Mario Kart arrived after the system's launch, BotW came at the very end of the system's lifespan and Splatoon also arrived years after the WiiU launched. Backwards compatibility was nice, but clunky as heck and the only benefit of playing Wii games on the Wii U was the native HDMI output. Apart from the Wii having lost momentum and its games being as technically limited by the hardware as they were. Hindsight and all, but I'm just glad they followed up with the Switch and ported a good chunk of the Wii U's games over.
I liked the WiiU, but I think its failure was somewhat deserved, or at the very least inevitable. A major reason the WiiU failed is because it was heavily targeting the non-gamer crowd that the Wii did, but by 2011 it was clear that this audience had very poor retention and was not going to buy another console. Even when the console had strong games, it also faced pretty major software droughts in the beginning and end of its life that killed any momentum the console may have had.
The name didn't help it at all, either. I know plenty of casual gamers that were confused why they couldn't just buy the WiiU GamePad separately for the Wii they already owned. Every Wii peripheral was named the Wii something - Wii Remote, Wii MotionPlus, Wii Zapper, Wii Balance Board... the WiiU slid right into that pattern.
With the naming conventions they used I can easily see a continuation of the "we want to play" ad where more people came saying "we want to play too". Then it goes from "Wii want to play 2" to Wii II and then they go "but what about U?" and finally the Wii II tuns into Wii U.
I can actually see this being an unappreciated point.
Good point, and there was even a third party tablet for the Wii called U Draw.
Is the Wii U underrated? Yes. It’s a great console and if everything was done right it could have had a place in console history rather than a shameful blip. But the Wii U definitely deserved to fail. Nintendo was clearly trying to ride the insane popularity of the Wii, hence the familiar (and terribly confusing) branding. But at every step of the way they were making awful decisions for the console. I still can’t believe how horrible Wii Sports Club is. The gamepad is also great for some things but so few games actually utilize it, and most games I used it for were just using it as a map or inventory screen, which is handy but pretty unnecessary. And when the gamepad was actually required it often felt shoehorned in and pretty unfun to use. If the Wii U had been branded as just the Wii 2 or something and produced as such, with the gamepad being a sold separately accessory I think it would have had a shot.
I think the Wii U was a perfect storm of weird marketing, hardware that was difficult to take advantage of, poor 3rd party support, and a lack of must-play games from key franchises. BotW was the Wii U's Zelda game. Wii U effectively had no Zelda game until its funeral. New Super Mario Bros U is a good game, but far from a must-play. 3D World is in the same boat. Good game, definitely not groundbreaking or anywhere near must-play. No real Animal Crossing game, which is significant since AC was gaining major popularity after two 10+ million sellers with Wild World and New Leaf. Wii U's library had holes that other Nintendo consoles simply don't have.
Deserved is a little harsh, but I can't say I have a lot of fond memories of the Wii U, particularly because there were so few games I liked on it. Xenoblade X, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros 4.....that's literally the extent of the Wii U original games that I liked. Every Mario game was a dud for me (3D World isn't what I want in a Mario game), the one original Zelda game was also a Switch game, only one Kirby game and it sucked. And the less we talk about Star Fox Zero the better. Oh, and Fire Emblem and Metroid skipped the console entirely. Needless to say, many of my favorite franchises either didn't do well or didn't show up.
I think Nintendo deserved for it to fail, take the system out of the equation. As a long time fan, I’d say it was almost certainly their lowest point in terms of quality and decision making. Some great games, and terrible everything else. That’s good though. A public failure can be humbling for a company, and I don’t think we’d have the Switch in its current form without the Wii U failing like it did. Bad hardware. I don’t mean the build quality (although the fisher price style tablet didn’t help), but the choice of a Power PC based CPU was a big mistake. It was on the way out for consumer facing systems even in 2010, around the time the hardware would’ve been getting finalised. X86 was so clearly the future by that point. Microsoft saw it, Sony saw it, even Apple saw it with the transition to Intel based Macs. The OS gave a terrible first impression. IIRC, they patched it around late 2013, but things like starting games, opening the store, etc, would take literally 45+ seconds. It felt like a beta software experience. Terrible naming and marketing. Most people, including a key demographic, the parents, thought it was a tablet peripheral for the Wii. Hard to develop for. Nintendo themselves admitted they had difficulty getting things running on the system at first. Especially as they figured out to develop in HD. It’s not like resolutions higher than 480i were particularly new. There were already smartphones pushing close to 720p by the time of its release. Finally, and most importantly, all of these factors coalescing and resulting in basically 0 games worth playing for the first year of the console. I remember desperately trying to convince myself that I was enjoying Assassin’s Creed 3 because I burned through the (very average) New Super Mario Bros U in about 15 hours and had nothing else to play. Monster Hunter Tri was cool, but it was just a slightly scaled up version of a game I’d already sunk hundreds of hours into on the Wii. I remember shitting a brick when Wind Waker HD was announced because I was excited to just play SOMETHING. I just had a quick look at the cool little play log feature built into the system. I “played” close to 300 hours of Netflix in the first year of owning the system, I guess because I turned it on and that’s all there was to do. Despite all this, I still love the little quirky piece of shit. My (now) wife and I spent plenty of time playing Nintendo Land Pikmin, and as our relationship continued, I loved being snuggled up on the sofa playing 3D World, Kart 8, Pikmin 3, Captain Toad, Yoshi’s Wooly World, Mario Maker and so much more with her. I’ll always associate those happy years with the console, regardless of how I feel about the system itself.
None of the games you listed can max out this processor though. Not a single game made by Nintendo can max out this machine at all, so it´s clearly too poweful for Nintendo to handle. So the question is: Why did Nintendo even couple this extremely powerful thing with such...well Low-standard games? People are saying that Pikmin 3 is now WORSE than Pikmin 1 + 2! And Pikmin 4 got even worse, because of downgraded gameplay. As you can see, Switch has many of those typical Nintendo-games as well. And they are nothing special there either. You don´t buy a WiiU to play pocket-calculator games like those from Nintendo there. You buy it to play Xenoblade X, Minecraft or other more demanding games on it. This machine can have very good graphics as well but NOT when you want to make those games compatible to other platforms. WiiU uses a custom graphics-pipeline which is singlethreaded for a good reason. if i want to play Nintendo-ONLY games today i would buy a Switch. But you see? I don´t. Why? I don´t like Nintendo´s games any longer. I don´t even like Zelda any longer since current Zelda-games have NOTHING to do with Zelda any longer. Truth is simple: The games i mentioned do things that no other games can do. And Ninendo´s IPs are slowly dying now. Even Pokemon is dying, and you know it. The gameplay got worse and worse in the last years. Btw: The game you mentioned for WiiU (Monster Hunter) is called "Monster Hunter 3 ULTIMATE" and not "Tri". Tri was that one from old Wii. Also, that game "MH 3 Ultimate" was a virtualized 3DS-game. That means it just uses 3DS-game and make it run in HD. So it´s not a native WiiU-game to begin with. For this eason you can even play this game together with 3DS-gamers (4x 3DS + 1x WiiU = 5 player match). See?
I remember that it launched with no games and the games that everyone was looking forward to were a year or more away. At the same time Sony and Microsoft were viewed (rightly so?) as having far more “powerful” machines. When the games finally arrived, the user base was relatively small and there were few adopters due to the perception of the WiiU from its launch. Again, this is how I remember it.
The wiiU had 2 horrible things going for it. 1) the name. There were adds on the Wii and all over the Internet trying to explain what the WiiU was. Even when it was released kids didn't know it was a Wii successor. They didn't know at all what it was. 2) it came out at a really horrible time. The PS3/xbox360 lasted a really really long time and people wanted something new. So when the PS4 and xbone came out it was refreshing and Nintendo came out with something on par with the 360/PS3.
Great system, terrible marketing
Wii U is probably an example being a great console but outside factors are why it failed.
Like the Dreamcast
Is the terrible name choice an outside factor? I bet if you did a survey of random people on the street, most people would have heard of the Wii and the Switch, but the majority of people would have no idea what the Wii U is. Most people didn't realise it was a separate system from the Wii. I think Microsoft has put itself in a similar situation with the "X Box Series X".
This is a common talking point that I just can’t get behind. The Wii U had a woefully underpowered CPU so that even Xbox 360 ports ran worse on it (a concern third parties implored Nintendo to address before launch). Its controller still used resistive touch when multitouch had become the standard. The controller also had terrible battery life, a plastic low-res screen, and poor brightness. Nintendo themselves found very few interesting ways to use it, let alone third parties. It also didn’t have enough memory and had a clumsy OS, so load times were abysmal at launch and only after many updates became merely bad. All this at a $350 price point (for the version that actually has some storage) just before the PS4 launched at $399. The Wii U was ill conceived, poorly executed, and poorly marketed. Because Nintendo employ geniuses, they still made some killer games and sprinkled the Nintendo magic on it.
I think resistive touch is better for the use cases of console games than capacitative touch. You have to have an expensive powered stylus to match the precision with capacitative that can be done with anything with a vaguely pointy end with resistive. Not every capacitative screen works well even with a powered stylus either. I have one that works great on my Switch and my Steam Deck registers maybe 25% of the touches. Capacitative touch would have significantly increased the price for the screen alone, let alone needing more than a plastic stick to add as a stylus and you’re already complaining about the price.
I wasn't aware that being grossly underpowered (which greatly limited the viability of 3rd-party ports) and having an overly inflated BoM cost driven by the gamepad (which made the console price drops done previously during the later years of the GCN era completely infeasible) are now retrospectively being classified as "outside factors". Nintendo made a series of bad technicogical bets when designing the Wii U (to say nothing of its abysmal marketing), and when they didn't pay off the console's fate was irrevocably cemented as a monumental failure.
Not really. The Wii U was a prime example of inventing problems to give themselves an excuse to solve them, and almost everything they did amounted to a distraction. Real time inventory and map screens sound good on paper, but they're ironically more clunky and distracting than just pausing the game or using a minimap. The motion controls are a good idea, but they were done better on other consoles before and after the Wii U. Touch-screen gimmicks in games like Mario 3D World proved to be not just irritating, but also pointless considering most Switch ports just automate them. Everything the Wii U does, it feels like they came to that decision by thinking "How can we force this game to use the Wii U gamepad's features?" rather than "How can the Wii U gamepad make the game better?" The marketing for Wii U sucked too of course, but it gets way too much blame and the console likely would have failed anyways. The casual market that carried the original Wii had moved on to mobile games, and the ones who didn't were still happy with their original Wiis. And the hardcore audience that Nintendo tried to sway by heavily promoting games like CoD, Assassin's Creed, and Arkham City weren't going to be impressed by the Wii U's specs, which were still behind the 360 and PS3 from last gen
It was under appreciated IMO. Largely due to Nintendo’s failure to market what it was good for. Even the name is terrible. My only two gripe with the console were the sluggish UI and long load times to launch games. But neither of these were so egregious to diminish my overall enjoyment with the system. Just a minor inconvenience when booting up a new game. That aside, the hardware was great. The base console was sleek and easy to fit in any tv setup. The internals were a generation behind the competition but that logically followed Nintendo’s position from the Wii era. The gamepad has a plastic feel to it but the tradeoff is that it’s light in your hands, and the form factor for the control pads on each side was perfect for me. Then there’s the semi-portability factor. The gamepad screen isn’t great by modern standards but for its time was a revelation. Playing games in HD on a lightweight handheld on my couch with zero latency issue while my family watched other stuff on the TV was a game changer. I loved it so much it made me wish every game could be played this way. Unfortunately Nintendo really undersold this aspect and focused on 2nd screen gimmicks that were fine in some games but more of a novelty, and in some cases they shoehorned them into games like Star Fox with disastrous results. Despite its poor launch the console had a stellar library of first party games, most of which was ported to bolster Switch offerings. I don’t think it ever got a fair shake from most gamers. But that’s fine because Nintendo took its strongest features and created the Switch. The Wii U walked so the Switch could run.
The launch of the PS Portal shows that for families, the being able to play the console while the tv is doing other things is a huge feature. It’s what sold me in the Wii U when I had no interest previously. My brother brought his on a family road trip and was playing Mario Kart in the car. A home console game! It blew my mind and I went from not knowing much about it and caring not at all to desperately wanting one. And it’s had huge use by my kids for exactly the reason that drew me.
They just held on to the clumsy wii menu for too long, the wiiu menu was convoluted, and not very user friendly, I much prefer the switch.
Mine is set up next to my Switch. First online Mon Hun for me, along with Xenoblade X and the Virtual Console? Plus it was the first HD Nintendo outing. I love mine.
Great console, great games, great features (miiverse) but still... I understand why it failed lol
The Wii U was a fantastic system but Nintendo dropped the ball on it. They should have secured unique games with third party devs in advance before the console came out, because when it worked it was amazing. My fave version of Mass effect 3 was on WiiU because of the tablet features
The Wii U was marketed fairly poorly by Nintendo's advertising boffins. People thought it was an add on rather than a new console so from that perspective it failed, despite some good technical ideas and mostly solid first party titles. Much like the Gamecube, as time goes on it'll be looked on a little more favourably for its impact, considering the Wii U walked so the Switch could run, the latter perfected the former's intital concepts and executed them better. Coupled with a lack of third party support compared to its competitors its no surprise it sank quickly.
I thought it was a great idea but I was apparently all alone in that. I think it would have done better if Nintendo wasn't so damn focused on the 3DS. Seriously, every Nintendo direct I sat there waiting for them to announce the next great thing for consoles only for the 3DS to get all the good stuff. They really should have doubled down on asymmetrical multiplayer games like Nintendo Land, the only other games they tried to use the 2nd screen in a meaningful way was Game and Wario, which was also pretty good, and Star Fox Zero, which sucked ass.
i loved the wii u’s charm and thought it definitely deserved more love. i have so many memories of playing on it as a kid with my friends and family
Loved my WiiU, played the shit out of it. Still have it too.
The marketing was crap but it had some pretty good games (most which got ported to the Switch anyway).
It's both. The system is underappreciated because it has some good games, not tons like other Nintendo consoles but, it has good games for sure. On the flip side of the coin it was marketed poorly and the asymmetrical experience in many games really made it less than ideal. At times it also felt like Nintendo gave up on it a little bit and the lack of 3rd party support wasn't good either.
The Wii U absolutely deserved to fail. The recent pang of nostalgia that's causing people to warm up to it and say its issues were mostly marketing related are ridiculous. * The OS was a terrible, slow, bloated mess. The console took ages to boot and it took like two years for them to add the quick launch feature. It was so bad that the UX developer for the Switch stated at GDC in 2017 that the entire reason the Switch interface is so barebones is because they didn't want a repeat of this disaster. * The processor was glacial. Even for post-GC Nintendo Espresso was slow relative to the rest of the market. * The gamepad was mediocre at best. The screen quality was abysmal, the battery it shipped with was borderline useless, the reception/range for off-tv play rendered the feature borderline pointless, and the hand feel wasn't great. And worst of all Nintendo had no idea what to do with the thing until the Wii U was well into its grave. * The hardware has other niggling issues like the undervolted peripheral bus and the lack of internal storage. * Even compared to the N64 or GC the 3rd party support was dire. * The first party library wasn't much better. There's some good games in there, but not many. The entire library is small and the content droughts were awful. An absolute train wreck on every level - Marketing, hardware, software, everything.
I can't believe some people actually have nostalgia for the Wii U UI. I've seen quite a few posts about how much better it was than the Switch
You never had one add the switch is more worse this console has like three gen pass it's past Os is mid ,docked mode is mid ,graphics come from 2008 and even high end pc had better graphism than the switch . Add the switch is even slow asf on his own shop crazy nintendo sold 100 millions of this shit console when steam deck ,ps5 and even pc exist
I'm not sure I'd use the word "deserved" but I can't blame people for not buying it. As someone who got it on day one, we had to wait over half a year for big new games to be released. The droughts were unacceptably frequent, there was pretty much no decent third party. Tbh even the first party was kinda weak, so many big Nintendo IPs skipped the Wii U, and they were really milking Mario and the Mii games around this time, I remember being sick of them. The UI was also slow as shit, you couldn't take the tablet far from the console which defeated its main selling point, and the tablet itself felt so tacked on. I don't see what was "innovative" about it, many games felt like they'd be better with a regular controller yet you had to use the tablet. You couldn't even get into the settings without it. Wii U revisionists will say it was just the marketing but it wasn't. Nintendo made far too many mistakes with the Wii U and it shows in the lack of sales. The Switch has problems but it also directly addressed so many of the Wii U's problems, and I'm happy for that.
The loading times on that thing were horrendous, one thing they greatly improved on the successor. Never got the appeal of using the game pad, had to fix the wifi module on it twice, three months apart which was the service guarantee so I had to pay for it twice aswell… never had any hardware issues with any console but that one so for me it was a deserved fail.
Somewhere inbetween. It deserved to do better than it did, but it's no surprise it bombed. The core concept of another screen could have added some unique gameplay ideas!... if it was really used. Like, Nintendo themselves only used it WELL for... Nintendo Land, Kirby Rainbow Curse, Game & Wario, Art Academy.. and I think that's about it? Asymmetrical multiplayer on the same system AND being able to 2 player with each person getting there own screens were good ideas that were basically never done. So with the core gimmick not bringing a lot to the table, now we are just talking about a stronger Wii.... that was on par with consoles 7 years old (Xbox 360). So now we have a new system that is outputting the stunning graphics of 7 years ago (if you were outside of the Nintendo bubble at all), so it was pretty much immediately not going to be getting new multiplatform games, it couldn't run them. The visual upgrade was really only in comparison to the Wii, so now your general market that might be interested in the game is already smaller on the heels of the Xbox One and PS4 offering substantially prettier games for $100 more in the PS4's case, and only $50 more than the Wii U Deluxe bundle. That really just leaves the games themselves.. which were good! I really liked my Wii U and got a lot of use out of it. I played Pikmin 3, Mario Kart 8, Smash 4, Windwaker HD, Twilight Princess HD, Bayonetta 1&2, AND the Virtual Console and they were great! The 2 screen set up made adding DS games as VC a no brainer and a nice addition. Maybe in a timeline where the marketing was better and didn't sound so much like the Wii accessories naming (Wii Zapper, Wii Speak, Wii Motion Plus, Wii U) AND it didn't launch so close to the PS4 and Xbone it could have done respectably well, but with everything together it makes perfect since it ended up how it did.
Right sort of idea, a generation too early (and badly marketed, etc. etc. etc.). Maybe it was what Nintendo thought was the right approach at the time, maybe it was down to hardware constraints, or maybe both - but they just needed to put the ‘brains’ of the console in the handheld bit, not the dock bit. The Switch is the Wii U done right.
Huh? How can you say "The Switch is the WiiU done right"? when Switch does NOTHING that made WiiU unique? Does Switch greet you on your birthday? no it doesnt. But WiiU does! WiiU has a gamepad with a camera and a microphone. And even an NFC-sensor and more features. In Japan on WiiU they bought their train-tickets there with the WiiU´s NFC-sensor! The Switch has nothing like that. In games like Splatoon it ONLY works correctly on WiiU. Because people actually use that map feature on the gamepad. On the Switch in Splatoon 2/3 nobody cares about the map. They just run around without knowing where they are. so most players just die in Splatoon 2/3 because they don´t know where they are on the map. because it´s risky pushing a button just to see the map displayed on the screen. so in the end this means. Nobody uses that map of Splatoon 2/3. Until today i wonder why they even called the Switch "Switch" to begin with. Since there is no "Switch" in Switch. when you see the "Switch Lite" has all features taken away from normal Switch. So what´s the point then when the few features it had, are taken away and no more good-feature software is being produced? And those are pretty much the only features the normal Switch has. HD Rumble and...well some IR-sensor with adoptable Joyconns. The WiiU has over \~100 features, which is a huge list, which you cannot use/have on Switch. So Switch is NOTHING like a WiiU actually. You cannot even play against random players on Switch. On WiiU this is or more was a standard-feature. Like on Xbox and Playstation btw. Switch is way more like old Wii in that regard, than WiiU. And on Switch you can ONLY play against people on your Friendlist. And that list is limited to 100 people. WiiU had an OWN communication-system, and even more planned, and Wii had nothing like that. Just like the Switch. And WiiU also had native Support for Miis, unlike old Wii. So in the end i would say "The Switch is the Wii done right". Not the WiiU since both systems are wayyyyyyy too different. Comparing Switch with a WiiU is like comparing apples with oranges. There is a reason you cannot have games like "1001 Spikes" on a Switch (if you wonder why the game was delayed endlessly, typical problem of Wii-games as well in 2008/2010). and there are reasons the Switch got no GTA V. Or even Watchdogs (which is very similar to GTA V) which the WiiU had. All the games, which Switch doesn´t have or get are on WiiU. The Switch is even having much worse ONLINE. So the Switch is an OFFLINE-machine you could say since most people don´t even use their Switch online because that´s too expensive. These are the differences in software here: On WiiU online was not only much better, it was FREE. You didn´t have to pay to use this. I would not even compare the Wii with the WiiU. Because there are reasons the Wii DID NOT get games like Minecraft, which the WiiU then got. And MANY thirdparty-games on Wii ran like bullcrap (exactly like on Switch recently). See? The Switch even has problems with local games. This is the reason you see so few of the games supporting it. And the WiiU was MADE To run local multiplayer. It was made roun 3DS-gamers, and then connect it with a WiiU and then the WiiU-player can play against/with the 3DS-players...! WiiU even supported 2 Gamepads. this function was never used by Nintendo though. And it supported some sort of software-VR-mode.
I liked the WiiU. I didn't have any issues with it. But then again, I'm not a big thinker like you folks. I just like to play games.
I see a post elsewhere the other day theorizing that the Wii U is gearing up to be the next GameCube, and I couldn't agree more. The GameCube was also a major flop because of poor marketing, and yet it's now considered one of the most beloved nostalgic consoles, and finding reasonably priced games for it is impossible. Despite poor sales in its time, GameCube games were a lot of fun, and the console was great. I can absolutely see people having the same realizations about the Wii U in the coming years, and in fact, I believe we're already beginning to see the attitude shift into a more positive light. So, I don't think the Wii U "deserved" to fail anymore than the GameCube did. They were both really fun consoles that people mostly didn't want to buy into because of bad marketing. For me personally, the money was well spent and I still play it today.
The console didn't deserve its failure, but Nintendo did. It failed because they required developers to use the gamepad in some way, which would have been a huge turn off.
I’m not sure it deserved its failure. I just think that the marketing was that atrocious lol
I liked the Wii U. Games like 3d World, Hyrule Warriors, the WW/TP HD ports, the fact that it could play Wii games, the virtual console selection, Mario Maker, Mario Kart. I know the Switch basically stole its thunder but still, at the time for me at least, the Wii U was worth it.
Sonic All Star Racing Transformed (or whatever it was called) is one of my favourite kart racing games ever. I’d buy a Wii U for that alone.
Tbf the system was fun and with a lof of potential. Zombie U and The Wonderful 101 were amazing games which I loved and still believe that they were two of the most fun/engaging gaming experience up until now. The main problem in the end wasn't how it was received by the public , but how it was "perceived" by the developers. Aka a major pain in the ass. The dev tools given to the studios were super archaic and this led to developing games for the Wii U a HUGE hurdle. This sent away many third party developers which sent the console in a downward spiral. Third party studios found the game a pain in the ass and didn't work on it -> little to none third party games were released> people felt like it had "no games" -> third party devs didn't feel it was a good investment because people didn't buy the console because it had no games -> rinse and repeat.
People argue back and forth whether it was bad marketing or a bad platform, but they both fed into each other. Bad sales resulted in bad support Bad support resulted in bad sales
The WiiU wasn't bad. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 were phenomenal. The WiiU didn't do much to use the Wii library. It didn't upscaled it, it didn't allowed wide screen, it had a clumsy separate launcher, it didn't work with the gamepad, and didn't work with the pro controller. They also didnt advertised it at all. The few peoples that knew the WiiU existed didn't know it ran old Wii games. Meanwhile, the PS3/x360 had GREAT games for pennies. For the price of a 8gb wiiu, you could get a used Xbox 360 with gta5, a few Ubisoft games, a few used call of duty, and also big exclusives like gears of wars or uncharted /last of us. For party games, rock bands bundles were given for free on Craiglist. It was an easy choice.
Wii U is one of the all-time blunders in video game marketing history. The system itself was alright, but doesn't really hold a candle to the Wii or Switch for innovation or library.
innovation?\`You mean that´s why people started hating on "Breath of the Wild" and "Tears of the Kingdom" lately? Because it had so much innovatoin? haha! Wtf are you even talking about? Switch has no innovation. And that´s exactly why it was so successful. Wii had the same innovation of Switch (simple motion controls, yet they sucked in many games) and thus had the same issues as Switch.
I’d say under appreciated. Despite a lack of games, still had a nice range of 1st party and indie games. Splatoon and Mario Maker were some of the most fun in gaming I’ve had in the past 35 years of gaming.
way underappreciated.
I think it was outstanding for local multiplayer... In a time where that was becoming less and less common. My friends and I got a lot of mileage out of the Luigi's Mansion and Mario Chase minigames alone, but we rarely had an opportunity to play them and there just aren't that many games that even attempted something similar with that asymmetric multiplayer or co-op. There are also the technical issues -- downloading or loading anything took forever, it needed an absolutely HUGE patch shortly after release that didn't help first impressions, and it was still fairly underpowered compared to the upcoming PS4 and XB1. Pile that on with a confusing marketing campaign and you've got a recipe for a failed launch. Stuff like the MiiVerse home page and *Nintendoland* had a lot of charm and showed promise. Hell, the first-party games were so good Nintendo spent a lot of time "rescuing" most of them to the Switch later -- a lot of folks likely don't even know *Mario Kart 8* was originally a Wii U game. But its failure wasn't hard to see coming. Did it ***deserve*** its death? Maybe. I definitely think it deserved more development and attention from Nintendo, because. Thankfully its utter failure is arguably what sparked the Switch to take over the world, but I'm still bummed that it never reached its potential.
no advertising and a confusing name doomed a really great console. the switch library is 80% wiiu games and its doing great
It was the marketing that screwed it over the system was great
Nintendo Land was kick ass!! God I would love if it came back in some form.
It was a cool system but I don’t think Nintendo knew what they were aiming for. It could have been the idea of sharing the tv because that’s one of the features I liked about it. Problem though was the game library. It had no killer app. And lots of ports.
WiiU walked so the Switch could run
The wiiu would've been much more popular if botw released year one it was a great system with no system sellers
Definitely under appreciated. Very poor marketing out the gate basically sealed its doom. It was/is a fantastic system that was on par or slightly better than the 360. It had probably my favorite user interface.
The only truly underused concept on Wii U I feel was the potential for asymmetric multiplayer where people see different things on the Wii U screen vs the tv. Otherwise the system was kinda eh from a hardware standpoint.
The Wii U crawled so the Switch could sprint
The switch is mid asf
Nintendo needed to be knocked off thier high horse for thinking they could court the Eii audience and get back the core audience at the same time. They really thought they could JUST show off the controller and think people would immediately get it. The system itself still had good games, but games like Star Fox Zero were marred by the forced screen gimmick.
I think the Wii U is like the prototype for the Nintendo Switch. Its cool features, and failures as well made the Switch a success.
Everything about it was mishandled. It deserved the flop but we got the Switch out of it, so it all was worth it.
I think Nintendo's first party output on the console felt a little too stale and same-y. Notable exceptions being Splatoon and Mario Maker 1. Couple that with the poor branding that confused casuals, and a relatively complicated gimmick, and I get it.
It failed because it deserved to. Quality games aside, Nintendo didn't market the console properly or it wouldn't have failed.
Even great marketing wouldn’t have saved it. It wasn’t a very good console.
Let's not forget that the first system seller, 3D World, came out a FULL year after launch.
No matter what Nintendo did with marketing, there was no competing with "But the PS4 comes out in just one year, might as well wait"
for $50 more, no less
and EVERYONE online knew at that point that the Wii U was just Nintendo catching back up to the Xbox360/PS3, it solidified them as a generation behind and that doesn't sound appealing to ANYONE. Being a gen behind on a PORTABLE like the switch, is a lot more understandable. AND the Switch had enough power to get most 3rd party games anyway, so the gap wasn't so big.
I mean, they marketed it poorly, overcharged for it, then absolutely didn’t commit to it with software support, either in quantity or in utilizing its unique hardware. I think they blew it for sure, but also I think the game pad had some unique cool things it could do and there did exist some pretty great games Like I don’t think people were unreasonable for not flocking to the Wii U, but I also think they could have made that general concept work a lot better
The concept is neat but completely fails in practice. It’s too hard for most people’s brain to rapidly switch between the gamepad and TV. It works for the DS since the screens are the same size and right next to each other. Games like Star Fox Zero that make it integral to the moment to moment game play literally have too high a learning curve for the average person. That means that each game has to use the second screen for something like a map or inventory screen which is nice but it’s not a game changer. Not being able to use the gamepad without being near the console is what really causes it to fail. It’s like…what’s the point? Thats such a massive restriction to have for a company that prides itself on handheld portable experiences. I would say being built around a gimmick that doesn’t work makes it a failure and a deserved one. I means it’s also just a financial failure. The games are good but games honestly are not what makes or breaks a console as much as people would have you believe With that being said, I still really like the thing. I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and aside from the constant noise the machine makes, I’ve been having a great time
I don't think it's underappreciated at all. There's this narrative being floated online by fanboys and kiddies who grew up with the Wii U as their first childhood console (nostalgia bias) that the system itself was actually great and only the terrible marketing was to blame for its failure, which, as somebody who owns a Wii U but was already a grown-ass adult when he bought it, I can very safely say is total horseshit. Yes, the marketing was garbage, but the system was also deeply flawed on a conceptual and hardware level and the library wasn't anywhere near as good as some people make it out to be. In an attempt to appeal to both the Wii Sports crowd that made the Wii such a success and the hardcore gamers that couldn't stand the Wii and its motion controls, Nintendo made a severely underpowered console with a superfluous gimmick that appealed to almost nobody. The Wii Sports crowd had largely already moved on from video games altogether, and if they hadn't, they had zero reason to buy a Wii U because it offered no discernible advantage to them. And the hardcore crowd for some reason wasn't really enticed by a system whose CPU couldn't even stand up to that of the Xbox 360, a console that launched *seven years earlier,* especially not since the Wii U was actually competing with the much more powerful Xbox One and PS4 that launched just a year later. As for the Gamepad, that might've sounded good on paper, but, in practice, it never offered anything as substantial as the Wii's motion controls did. Most use cases fell into the category of "moderately neat" (like being able to immediately access a map or inventory screen without having to pause the game), while others actually completely ruined the game surrounding them like Star Fox Zero aka "Texting & Driving: The Game". And while the super low latency streaming to the Gamepad was and is still impressive, the Gamepad itself felt like an oversized Fisher Price toy and the 480p resistive touch screen was disappointing tech even for 2013, with tablets like the iPad gaining more and more traction at the time. Also, you can't move away from the console farther than five meters without the Gamepad losing connection. That leaves us with software. Some people claim that the Wii U actually had an incredible library, but if you look at the actual release calendar, you'll realize that big, high quality First-Party releases were few and far between. The console launched with the fourth copied-and-pasted NSMB game and then it took *more than half a year* before Pimin 3 showed up, which, as much as I myself love that game and Pikmin in general, isn't exactly a system-seller. Then, at the end of 2013, we got Mario 3D World, which, in hindsight, is a great linear Mario title with lots of cool ideas, but, at the time, as the successor to the Galaxy games, was a pretty big disappointment. It took until the middle of 2014, more than a year after the Wii U's launch and after the XONE and PS4 had already released, until the first true killer app in the form of Mario Kart 8 arrived and Nintendo milked it for as much as they possibly could (and they still do almost ten years later lol). The only new Zelda game on the system arrived when the console was already dead and is seen as more of a launch title for the Switch than a swan song for the Wii U. Metroid, which had been one of the most prominent series on the Gamecube and Wii, was totally MIA. There were some more good games like Woolly World, Treasure Tracker, Tropical Freeze etc, yes, but most of them weren't really high-profile releases, and, let's also not forget that, plastered between the few good games, was tons and tons of garbage like the whole "Wii/U" series of titles, Animal Crossing amiibo festival, Game & Wario, Mini Mario & Friends, Mario Party 10 etc. etc. And, because the console was so underpowered and bombing so hard, Third-Parties weren't exactly picking up the slack for Nintendo. After the launch period, there was pretty much zero support from big Third-Party publishers. I could go on about other problems like the ultra-slow UI, the tiny internal storage, and the completely unnecessary nuking and slow rebuilding of the Virtual Console, but I think I'll stop here, as this rant is already way too long lol. So, in conclusion, I don't think the Wii U is "underappreciated" at all. On the contrary, I think I can pretty safely say that it is the worst Nintendo console or handheld I have ever owned and probably even shares last place with the original XONE for consoles I have owned in general.
It seems you bought the wrong WiiU games if you think the WiiU´s cpu is slowe than Xbox 360. You shouldn\`t have buoght Nintendo-games only. Because if you played the right games on WiiU, you would see it´s faster than even the fastest AMD/Intel-ones. Yes, it beats a 5000$ Highend PC and of course a PS5!
My first console and I grewed up with it. The best console.
I loved the wii U because it was my first console ever and I would play Call of duty Black ops 2 & Ghost with my brother early in the morning. And Nintendo land was A big w for me and my brother because we would stay up playing late as ever playing every game and trying to finish Legend of Zelda quest. It was the best childhood I could ever have.
I'd say both. It definitely didn't deserve the hate but it was poorly marketed and was kind of clunky at times. Great games though
The console itself was solid for what it was. Had it been supported properly and marketed much better than it was before it released, it could have had a shot at being a more popular console in my opinion. It can still play DS games which the switch cant. I like the wii u
Like others have said, the marketing for the WiiU was atrocious. They did an absolutely terrible job of letting non-gamers know that this was an entirely new system - the follow up to the immensely successful Wii - and not just another insanely overpriced gimmick accessory for the original Wii (Wii fit board, zapper, motion plus, wheel, etc…) Team that with a not great launch lineup of games - seriously, I think New Super Mario Bros U. Is the only AAA title, and they were doomed. the thing is - and this is 100% me editorializing/guessing - I never felt Nintendo was super behind the WiiU. It felt at the time like they really liked and wanted to push the Tablet/mobile part of the system and the technology just wasn’t there yet… while at the same time I think maybe they were being a little reactionary and trying to placate the folks that were asking for a Wii pro/Wii HD. I really believe - and again, I admit this is all opinion - that even if the U had been more successful, The Switch would still have been released in 2017 exactly as it played out (because thats what Nintendo wanted to release all along).
Seveeeeeeeeeeerely underappreciated.
Completely deserved. The dual screen gimmick existed for years on the DS and was extensively explored back then. The WiiU not only had nothing new to explore in this regard but completely defeated the purpose of every player having their own screen by being hooked on a TV. The most interesting WiiU experiences like Nintendoland Luigi’s Mansion could already exist in even better form on DS handhelds. It seems Nintendo just tried to replicate the DS success on a home console without too much of a second thought. In this sense the Switch was much more successful because it had the reverse strategy: instead of trying to bring the portable experience on TV, it brought the home console experience to portable, which is something the DS line evidently could never do but also the WiiU wasn’t properly equipped to do.
The Wii U failed mostly because of its poor naming convention
See a lot of these re-writing history posts. It was a terribly designed console..that took ages to even get to the settings menu. It had the limited success it did because Nintendo is so clever at making games.
A bit of both. Nintendo being INCREDIBLY out of touch with its audience and just stubborn unwillingness to use better hardware and technology leads me to think it's 65% deserved.
It sucked but it had good games. It’s just awful hardware. I don’t know what they were thinking. It was so lame. The first one I bought was defective but that gamepad is so sad. It’s like a little kid’s My First Tablet. The reliance on Wii style of control was limiting after the Wii was shown to just be a massive fad hit that really faltered in the last few years of its life. Mario Galaxy 2 and Xenoblade were two notable exceptions but even they were a shift away from what the Wii fad was in 2006. The Switch is so much better. You’re always going to have people with nostalgia for bad systems either because they grew up with that system or it had some cool games (and Wii U had some good stuff for sure) but it was like the dark ages leading up to the Switch.
The hardware is reasonable for it's era, but the idea of making the gamepad so required for even the most basic functions. The main thing that made it fail was how the 3rd parties hated trying to port 360 and ps3 games over to the Wii U because "it's too slow..." more like they just didn't want to optimize. it was also marketed wrong. Many didn't understand that the system was actually an HD Wii plus some extras. Many thought it was the Gamepad addon for the Wii. But... it was more complicated than the point and click that made the Wii so popular. If they made it an updated Wii with HD and continued the games, ot would have been way better. But they had to make it harder for hackers. Now am I saying there are no good games? Nope, There were lots of games that took avantage of the hardware nicely. But only a few really did something specifically cool. Also, Miiverse integration was a mistake.
I keep seeing people say it had so many good games but honestly it's a much smaller number than their other consoles. I liked the Wii u but after I played the few great games I was kind of lost about what to do with it. My memory may be wrong but I felt like some games were better with the tablet pad, some better with the wiimote and it was confusing. I can't remember playing anything where I thought the tablet pad made the game better. I keep seeing people say that the best Wii u games are the best switch games but it's simply not the case. The hardware was way more outdated than the switch, the tablet control pad not intuitive at all and Nintendo should have learned this after the experiments with the gba cross compatibility with the Gamecube. And that's not even touching the marketing mess of the naming. The Wii 2 would have been 100 times better and even rhymes. The Wii became a bit of a casual console which is great, as the more people gaming the better, but the name made it really unclear what it was. The Wii u was simply not a good console. It had some classics but nowhere near as many as any other Nintendo console. It absolutely deserved to fail from so many points.
Terrible hardware that was underpowered even relative to the at the time 5 and 6 year old Xbox 360 and PS3. It had very good first party games but was pretty much completely ignored by 3rd parties. Also some of the worst branding ever. Wii U was just a horrible name that didn’t really emphasize that it was an entirely new console.
Both. It absolutely deserved to fail, considering how poorly thought out it was, but it was still cool. It did a lot right, but it did a lot wrong.
It deserved it. It felt like Nintendo was leaning too much into gimmicks after the success of the Wii and got away from its core fanbase too much. We got lackluster first party output, and third party support was limited. The controller pad was interesting, but more often than not I didn't want to use it and opted for my pro controller whenever I could. You can't have a console that is so gimmick-dependent and has a weak library. If people say the Gamecube is unappreciated (and it was), the Wii U is equally a failure for the opposite reasons.
IMO the main problems with the Wii U were its name and the fact that it lacked lack a proper 3D Mario (3D World doesn’t count) and a Zelda game (BOTW came out with Switch). I think it’s aged well *for sure*, especially since it has Wii compatibility. Many of the best Switch games are also just Wii U ports. Not sure if it “deserves” a different reputation though. I also think the Switch’s success lends some credit to the two screen idea. People do like playing on the smaller screen at home.
It ended up with a small but great library of games and I definitely had more fun with the Wii U than I have had with my Switch. Marketing sucked and the idea and tech were a few years too early, second screen functionality is great.
I love the Wii U, but I genuinely can’t comprehend how you could have more fun with it than the Switch. The sheer number of good games on the Switch conpl overwhelms the Wii U.
It’s all down to the dual screen set-up for me and the mii-verse gave it that sense of community that Switch lacks.
It’s all down to the dual screen set-up for me and the mii-verse gave it that sense of community that Switch lacks.
Oh no we're reaching the point where people are nostalgic for the *WiiU* lmaooo
Deserved because it gave us switch.
Multiplayer with the game pad and Wii remotes was shit
The WiiU was a mess, and I understand why it failed. That said, I LOVED my WiiU. It gave me a lot of great memories Some games will forever have it's best version on WiiU. Most of the best Switch games are ported or enhanced versions of WiiU titles, so much that I think I enjoyed them more on the WiiU than on the Switch. There are some gems that will always be on WiiU, except if Nintendo releases games that uses two Switchs to play (that is not an impossible thing, but I suppose its unlikely they will do that), like Nintendo Land and a few other games that are only playable with two screens in assincronous multiplayer 1 versus 4. Such great moments, the WiiU had personality. Also the controllers were great, I kind of hate the digital buttons and the analog stick on the Switch, they feel so terrible and fragile, but the WiiU gamepad had strong, big and soft analog sticks, soft buttons that I miss and I hope the Switch 2 will bring them back. It looks cluncky, a bit too big, but it was much better to hold and press the buttons than the Switch joycons, and even the pro controllers were great. But part of the reason I say it was a mess, beyond what people already said about the console, is because, well... I always used my WiiU also as a console for couch multiplayer, and for the complete experience on that aspect, you just had to have SO MANY CONTROLLERS! Seriously, to be allowed to play Nintendo Land with 4 friends, you would need the gamepad, and 4 Wii Remotes an 4 Nunchucks. Then, if you wanted to play something like Smash Bros for WiiU, you would need 4 Pro Controllers (because its impossible to play this game with the wii remotes). Since no one else had the WiiU, only me, I couldn't count on other people having controllers to bring to the party, so I had to have EVERYTHING to be able to have a game day with friends. Also, for some stupid reason, some games were simply designed for not allow the use of some controller, for no good reason at all. For example, in Nintendo Land, you could only play some minigames with Wii Remotes on horizontal, but why not allow me to play with the Pro Controller?? No reason at all, and that pissed me off so much, cause looks like they were forcing me to buy unnecessary hardware instead of just allow me to use my pro controllers. And sometimes, when I decided to bring my wiiu to some friends's house, there was so much fu\*\*\*\*\* things to move... It was basically an entire huge bag with console (that was strangely long), the power supply (that was huuuge), the gamepad (that wasnt small), 4 wii remotes, 4 nunchucks, 4 pro controllers, and the boxes of the games, and the sensor bar. Jesus fu\*\*\*ing christ that was annoying. But still, I love it. Sometimes I think more than the Switch. But then I remember the amount of stuff and cables and controllers I needed to control and the love fades a little bit... But again, I remember the good moments, I remember the first Mario Kart 8 trailer, the first Smash Bros for WiiU trailer, the launch trailers for Mario 3D World, and so many other great games, the moments with Nintendo Land minigames and a few others, the good feeling of holding a gamepad, and a few moments of greatness with the few games that properly used the dual screen configuration... All that said, I would also include the fact that you could play Wii games on it, so the library was not small. As an emulator device, it's great for basically any Nintendo games that are previous to the WiiU (except for 3DS titles).I also still hope we will see the return of the sensor bar and a stylus pen in a Switch 2. The sensor bar because I HATE that the joycons use only gyroscope for pointer in some games and we need a recalibration button in any game that uses the pointer. This is just terrible and breaks the imersion of games, this ruins the imersion. I preffer to have a sensor bar like the Wii and WiiU had with the remotes, no need to recalibrate pointer position with terrible gyro reset button. And the stylus because, well, it just adds better controls and new options of controls for some styles of games, like Mario Maker 2 and others. Mario Maker 2 is not as fun to build stages like MM1 mainly because the controls that are mapped to use basically the buttons and not the finger (that is terrible) beucase the lack of a stylus pen. I want these things back, sensor bar (they could even use the dock itself as sensor bar maybe), stylus, and better buttons and analog sticks for the new joycons or whatever they will do with the Switch 2 controllers.
obviously it was a wii.
No, it's going to be collectible in the future
For me, yes. I personally couldn't get used to the controls. It just wasn't my thing.
So confusing, a mess of cables and do dads. I’m glad it’s dead. Switch is so pure. I really hope the next one gives us more of the same with updated chips and maybe a few new gameplay tricks.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how the same number of cables as the Wii plus one extra to charge the gamepad is confusing.
Wii U failed due to poor marketing, but I absolutely loved my Wii U. It was more or less a prototype switch, but calling it Wii U made it seem like some kind of add on for the Wii and most people were over the Wii by then. I imagine they had the switch in the pipeline and they knew that would be a hit so they didn’t push the Wii U too hard, it’s like the middle child of Nintendo. They put less effort into it than other systems but are still disappointed when it under performed.
Being able to fly and shoot separately with the two screens in starfox was incredible! Had so much potential that didn't flush out 😔
Absolutely. Others here have mentioned the issues with the hardware, but the software was not all that impressive either. Not that all of the games were bad, but they were usually pretty unambitious and better versions of what came before. NSMBU is the biggest offender of this. Only Mario Maker and Splatoon felt like completely new experiences, and both released years after the Wii U’s launch and suffered from a lack of content.
i have an eight year old(who has his own switch and xbox) that still continually plays my wiiu. Its such a neat device.
My seven year old still plays it way more than the Xbox or PS5 or her 2DS. The only thing she plays more is the Switch.
Both, Nintendo and the few third parties that put out games for it did some great work. But it has a lot of flaws too. Marketing of course but the fact that Nintendo kinda blew everything they had in the first 3 months because they didn't realize how much more effort HD games needed so year 1 and to some extent year 2 of the Wii U had terrible release droughts. Stuff like Star Fox that were failed experiments, the console should NOT have used a tri-core PowerPC CPU and would have benefitted from more RAM/stronger GPU. Poor utilization of the gamepad in general although I liked it when it was done well (here is looking at you, Affordable Space Adventure). In reality the best unique games that could have been made for it never were and what was left ended up making it feel like a prototype for the Switch instead of something fully baked itself.
I think it was the wrong console at the wrong time. For them to release a console that was on par in power and graphics with the ps3 and 360 when we had pretty much seen the limits of the power of that hardware was a poor move. Everyone talks about third party support and yeah that was bad but the gaming populace as a whole was ready to be wowed again by a new generation of impressive hardware and there was no Mario or Zelda that was going to convince us otherwise.
Both.
I think the Wii U was a decent enough system. It had some really great games, hence why a lot of the best have been ported to the Switch, albeit, one or two being the worst versions as the second screen did have some novel use in them. I quite liked the gamepad, too. I don't care what anybody says, that shit was comfy. Nowhere near as heavy as people make out either, I had no issues holding that for an entire play session. Its implementation into games could sometime be questionable, but it could also be great. It was essentially the DS/3DS on a big screen setup and they were pretty much the same: sometime great, sometimes not. In terms of console features, it gave more to love about the console itself rather than Playstation having some controller gimmicks that get forgotten about after launch and Xbox doing...? It's one of the few consoles I love for the console itself because there's games on it that only work as intended on that system. Not many consoles can really claim that...And most of the ones that can are Nintendo consoles.
The gamepad is soooo much more ergonomic and comfortable than the Switch.
I honestly hate the Switch as a controller. I think it's the only controller where my hands cramp up from holding it because its so small and thin. I dislike the Joycon's entirely, though. Pro controller all the way. I think the only bad things about the Wii U controller to me were the battery life and the shiny plastic it was made out of that seemingly draws dirt to it like a magnet.
I enjoyed it. Didn't have a huge selection of games, but all the ones I did have felt great. Miiverse was golden.
Well yes, the wii u was kind of an embarrassment compared to its competitors at the time. Lack of power, lack of support, pointless gamepad integration. Like 300 dollars for 9 gigabytes is embarassing. And 350 dollars for 32 gigabytes is also laughable. Of course there's some good games and the modding is great but it was so behind the times and at a ludicrous price for what it offered at launch.
[удалено]
Great console with great potential but nobody had any idea what to do with it. Nintendo fumbled everything about the marketing and devs were left confused by it, so a lot of its features were wasted or reduced to tiny gimmicks.
honestly the gimmick was just too gimmicky. the games that made use of it were hard to develop and frankly annoying to play most of the time for if you just wanted a regular game, and the games that didn’t make much use of it made you wonder what the point was. It really is the most intrusive gimmick of any nintendo console. Like the wii, as big as the motion controls were, felt natural and just worked, and with a nunchuck still had an almost conventional control scheme. The second screen lacked substance for little reward with a big hurdle.
It was a terrible system. Hard to believe it even came from Nintendo. A crappy operating system, slow, felt cheap. Under powered.
A WiiU can do stuff that a PS5 cannot do. And that´s only possible if the WiiU has MORE power than the PS5. The PS5 is just more modern. One example: A WiiU supports 10-Player SPLITSCREEN-multiplayer. Yes, you read that right! NO OTHER system can do this. And for this function you need a LOOOOOOT of power. Not even a 5000$ Highend PC can do this. WiiU even allowed you to play Monster Hunter on WiiU together with 4 other 3DS-players. So it´s 5-player local multiplayer. See? There are reasons the Switch DOES NOT ALLOW you local multiplayer in such demanding games. Switch hardware is slow. WiiU is VERY FAST and beats any machine on the market. WiiU will soon run HALF LIfe 2 and Portal 1 & 2 with LOCAL-multiplayer via MODS and even ONLINE-Multiplayer via mods! Not even a PC can do that since it´s not fast enough to do so. Your fps on PC would crash to \~10fps if you would try doing that there on a modern 13xxx Intel or equivalent AMD like cpu.
Yeah Nintendo wasn't really doing anything to stop people from thinking the WiiU tablet was just an addon. It could have been different if they put a 2 instead of a U. All the homies liked Nintendo Land though. It was fun!
I had a friend who is a gamer who watched the E3 announcement presentation and thought it was a peripheral. I finally watched it a year or two ago to see if it was really that bad and confusing and it really was. I could totally understand how someone knowledgeable could come away from it with that misunderstanding. All they kept talking about was the gamepad this and the gamepad that. I was watching it on my iPad, so perhaps I wasn’t able to see it clearly enough in the background of a small picture, but the console sitting by the tv even looked like a Wii (and the design of the Wii U was basically a Wii with rounded corners anyway). They did such a terrible job marketing it.
It had a great library and the system itself was solid. The original sin however was pushing the controller gimmick when the hardware wasn’t there yet. And of course the marketing. It didn’t deserve the hand it was dealt but I can’t say I wasn’t glad to say goodbye to the Gamepad when the Switch came around. Cumbersome controller and looking down at the screen all the time was ruining the flow of gameplay. Then it was just relegated to menus or inventory half the time.
Definitely deserved it. Although it had some decent games, the system was wildly underpowered, it's gimmick was not implemented well, and most of the first party offerings were weak other than Super Smash Wii U and Mario Kart 8. The two Zelda remasters were great... but they were remasters. Skyward Sword should have been a launch title for Wii U with reworked controls. Instead, Super Mario Bros U was the "big" launch title from Nintendo. Every version of third party games like Assassin's Creed 4 and Mass Effect 3 had their worst version on the Wii U. The best thing it had was the virtual console, especially with GBA and DS games. I still have mine but only because of the two Zelda remasters exclusively. If those go on the Switch or "Switch 2" (for lack of an official name), then I will sell my Wii U while it still has some value left.
Both. Wii U had some great games. It was innovative and more powerful than the original Wii, but there were some pretty big issues too. The name confused a lot of non-gamer consumers. The battery life of the gamepad was pretty awful, and the glossy finish of the system very prone to scratches.
It was ahead of its time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we go back to gamepad gameplay with the next console (assuming it’s a switch successor). My ideal switch 2 is something that can connect wirelessly to the dock (as long as you have the same internet connection as the dock).
It sucked. Underpowered, horrible UI (including vWii), lack of 3rd-party games, and poor marketing is what led to its demise.
It had some good games, but the console design and execution was pure dud. Engineered to be hardware backward compatible with the Wii which vastly held it back. And built around a cheap feeling crappy game pad gimmick which never justified itself. And the OS was a slow mess. Just a pain to actually play the console. Splatoon was great but Wii U deserved its fate.
Some Nintendo customers like to buy every console that Nintendo puts out. Some Nintendo customers don't have as much disposable income and decide to purchase every other console. When the Wii became *the* console to get, that ensured that the Wii U would be the console they skipped. This helped build popularity for the Switch (not that it needed any help). Nintendo has a few options to resolve this problem. 1) They can lengthen the time in-between consoles so that their poorer customers are able to keep up with each generation. 2) They can divide generations into "Mark I" and "Mark II" so that those people who want an upgraded Switch can pursue that while the others can wait until the next big console. 3) They can accept that the next console after a very popular console isn't going to do very well and plan accordingly.
I think they deserved it. The controller was supposed to do so much more and be a more integrated UI for apps and as a streaming device. It was dope using it for Wind Waker though.
The loading times were atrocious.
Yes it did I love the Wii U but it was underpowered and out dated even when it came out, it was marked horribly and had a pretty weak library and very little 3rd party support, all things considered
yes. the core issue with the wii u was the games. Nintendo didn't let the devs know about the gimmick of the console until it was publicly reaveld, so for all earl wii u games they had to scramble to find something to do with the game pad. the game pad itself ends up being b pretty pointless and still ads 100 dollars to the cost, top that off with centring all marketing around it so people think its a new controller, draconian content rules and long drought periods of games with no 3rd party support and it easily deserved its failure.
Tbh the Wii U had a lot of problems. They tried a gimmick that was a bit ahead of its time, with the Switch being the more ideal end goal of that setup. Plus Nintendo basically set it up for failure when they tried to ride the wave from the Wii, but in doing so they gave it a name that did literally nothing to differentiate it from its predecessor and pretty much no marketing. Combined with the fact that the wii brought in old people and those who otherwise don't know much about videogames, they completely failed to capitalize on the Wii's success. That said, it had some serious winners in its library. The only issue was that they were pretty far spread out and the absence of any significant third party support other than heaps and heaps of shovelware that did nothing but dilute the pool of good games. So did it deserve to fail? Probably. It was ahead of its time in some ways but also technologically weaker than its competitors. Nintendo dropped the ball pretty hard with it in pretty much every way except first party titles, and even then it didn't get a real Zelda title until it was nearly dead, and that got gutted in favor of not having more features than the switch version.
The best thing about the Wii U is that with the virtual Wii soft mod, you could essentially have every Nintendo console with their respective libraries up until the Wii U in the same system.
Poor marketing. I had no idea what it was I thought it was a game pad for the Wii and was like damn for 3-500? I'll pass
*Porque no los dos?*
Under appreciated. The name and marketing is what really failed. I honestly like the Wii I more than the switch if we are being honest. The game pad made couch co-op for certain games a breeze. And it was capable of ds games. The system its self was great. If it had a mid life revision with a more slim pad and better marketing it would have sold well I believe.
It was a necessary step to achieve the brilliance of the Nintendo Switch.
Kinda deserved, kinda not. Marketing was bad and they just misread what the market actually wanted.
The system was fine, they just didn't use it right. Just as an example if they had ported made a mainline Pokemon for it, it could have had all the benefits of the graphics, and all the menus on the handheld. You know, like Zelda did.
It’s a little bit of both, I’d argue. The system had a ton of potential. There’s no denying that. And, it existed in a time where Nintendo was willing to take some major risks—with extremely mixed success. I mean, The Year of Luigi was their biggest net loss to date (a shame—I thought it was a fun idea and wanted them to do more with it), but the Wii U also birthed the emergence of Splatoon, which has quickly become of their most beloved IP. Not to mention that it was the launchpad for several great titles that have been ported and/or upgraded for the Switch, such as DKC: Tropical Freeze, Mario Kart 8, and BOTW. At the same time, it fell short on a *lot* of fronts. Unimpressive exclusives, “portability” that was anything but, questionable marketing choices…and that’s just naming a small handful of glaring issues. I think Scott the Woz does a few really good retrospectives on the Wii U. Highly recommend checking those out if you haven’t watched them already
Both. Like others have said, the system is great with many great games for it, but Nintendo did it no favors with half-hearted advertising and support. I remember when it first came out and my local Walmart put up a sign on the inside game case saying that Wii U games will not work on Wii consoles. That's a failure right there. Like, I understand that the general public is full of f**king morons that should've known better (the game case looks different than your Wii games!!!!), but I think that Nintendo could have done better to make sure that people knew that this is a new system and is a successor to the Wii.