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Do people dislike the Wii U mainly because it was a commercial failure?


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The few games that genuinely employed the gamepad well are exceptional and show what the dreamcast should have evolved into.

Why the Dreamcast? Because of the little VMU screens you could stick into the controllers? That's a funny thought ...I never thought of Wii U and Dreamcast as anything alike, but I suppose they had a few things in common. Both odd little unicorn systems, with great first party games but little else, discontinued quite early because of poor sales, and fondly remembered for a few system exclusives.

 

It's a good toy, and I'll never give mine up because of all the stuff downloaded to it, but it doesn't get much playtime anymore.

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I can't say I really agree with the whole "marketing doesn't matter" thing. If it were indeed so unimportant, you wouldn't see companies constantly shelling out millions upon millions of dollars to get (and keep) eyes on even well-established brands and products.

Don't you feel like it holds you ransom because of that? Sometimes I think of getting rid of mine, but there goes the downloaded games.

 

Totally. It's a reason I never sold my Wii U when I was bored with it (or needed money). I am glad I still have it and don't plan on parting with it now, but I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind.

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Don't you feel like it holds you ransom because of that? Sometimes I think of getting rid of mine, but there goes the downloaded games.

Meh

It's just a thing

I chose to buy those downloadable games

It's no worse than my Dreamcast whose discs are worth pennies on the dollar

It's nice to have around, it's not like I'm sitting on a mother lode of an investment.

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If you have two or more roughly equal or at least equivalent competitors, then yeah, marketing can make the difference. And sometimes we see that in video gaming. I wouldn't argue that the Saturn lost vs. the PlayStation because of some horrendous marketing choices on the part of Sega. But they made obvious mistakes like releasing the console 4 months early with no preparation on the part of anybody. If they hadn't made such glaring mistakes and still lost, I'd have a harder time saying it wasn't just that the PlayStation was a product with more mass market appeal. But I do think the race would have been a lot closer if Sega hadn't made some of those early blunders.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but aren't decisions about when is best to release a product also a marketing decision?

 

I can't say I really agree with the whole "marketing doesn't matter" thing. If it were indeed so unimportant, you wouldn't see companies constantly shelling out millions upon millions of dollars to get (and keep) eyes on even well-established brands and products.

Exactly. In some cases the marketing budget is as large as the development budget.

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Also, at least in my case when I talked marketing, I was talking more than just advertisements and the like.

 

I'd also toss branding into the marketing category. While there's room to debate just how much harm it caused, I think it's fair to say that retaining the Wii name despite its 100 million units sold, hindered the system more than it helped.

 

Or the near total focus in the months leading to launch on the gamepad, when they never really offered a major exclusive that made it click for everyone why this was such an innovation. Nintendo never sold the gamer on the expensive Wii U gamepad, yet that was where Nintendo's focus leading to launch was placed squarely on.

 

It was viewed by the press and public as the big hook that was supposed to draw the gamer in, just as the touch screen for the DS and motion control had for the Wii. But the justification for it never really happened. Most of the best Wii U games played just fine with a Pro Controller, or could easily be envisioned working well with it had the developer implemented support.

 

Perhaps the best example of a game made possible by the Wii U gamepad, Super Mario Maker, could've just as easily been done justice on the 3DS (Which just about happened after the fact, sans the major omission of allowing 3DS users to upload their creations). It could've worked with a Pro Controller, but level editing would've been a chore instead of fun, I bet.

Edited by Atariboy
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That's a good point. The original Wii had a successful start almost entirely because of Wii Sports, not the box itself. Most of their customers bought the system as an appliance to play virtual bowling, boxing, tennis and stuff. They got tons of free publicity for that, and it clearly made the case for needing to own the system as compared to anything else out there.

 

With the Wii U, they didn't really have much of anything new to pitch consumers. That would all have been done on the software side by including a title that made solid use of the new controller and showed people why they needed it. From the get go, Nintendo framed it as a nice new feature, but flaunted their MiiVerse crap more than anything. Why were people supposed to care.

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I have Never owned a Wii U nor have I played one...

 

But assuming I remember correctly, wasn't there also an issue with the VC? Like, now it's in HD (Great!) but for some reason the screen is dimmer and the quality (therefore) is worse than what you already have and already paid for on the Wii? Seems to me this could add to the disappointment...

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The Wii is definitely my all time favorite home console, but I never got a Wii U simply because I disliked the gamepad. A local gaming pal I used to know owned a Wii U so I did get to try out it several times, and while the gamepad was a lot lighter than I would have expected I still didn't care for it's big bulky form factor. There were some pretty cool games on the system, the controller was just too big and unwieldy to make me want to get one.

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Can't say I disagree. The Switch is basically the size the gamepad should have been.

 

I am 6'4 240 lbs with huge hands and the gamepad still feels like I am playing with a lunch tray on my lap. I used the Pro Controller or a Wii-mote whenever I could during the Wii U's heydey

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I have Never owned a Wii U nor have I played one...

 

But assuming I remember correctly, wasn't there also an issue with the VC? Like, now it's in HD (Great!) but for some reason the screen is dimmer and the quality (therefore) is worse than what you already have and already paid for on the Wii? Seems to me this could add to the disappointment...

 

I have heard of this, but I can't say for certain since I didn't really get into the VC until the Wii U. An advantage to the Wii U version is an easy way to save a restore point and access it.

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NES games were always very dark and blurry on the Virtual Console. This holds true across the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS Virtual Consoles and isn't specifically a Wii U issue.

 

The Wii U's N64 games though were also dark, which wasn't the case on the Wii. But DS, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy Advance games suffered no such brightness ailments. SNES and GBA games look really nice on the Wii U, with DS games held back by their native rendering resolution. TurboGrafx-16 games also look fine to my eyes.

 

But I'd say it's a stretch that the Virtual Console in any substantial way contributed to the Wii U's success or lack of it. It pretty much flew under the radar with none of the buzz that the Wii VC generated in its opening months. I don't think it mattered to many, unfortunately.

 

The biggest VC issue though in my eyes was the incorrect aspect ratio in the early days. For the first year of the Wii U, all Wii content was stretched to 16:9 if your Wii U was set to output in HD. One had to revert to 480i or 480p to fix it, unless your HDTV allowed you to pillarbox a HD source (Some do, many don't; And it's extra image processing which can make input lag more noticeable).

 

But Nintendo finally patched it about 12 months in when they speeded up the dashboard significantly, so only anamorphic widescreen Wii content was stretched when the Wii U upscaled the image.

Edited by Atariboy
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I have Never owned a Wii U nor have I played one...

 

But assuming I remember correctly, wasn't there also an issue with the VC? Like, now it's in HD (Great!) but for some reason the screen is dimmer and the quality (therefore) is worse than what you already have and already paid for on the Wii? Seems to me this could add to the disappointment...

 

The results vary from platform to platform. Honestly, they weren't that bad overall. If you played VC games in the Wii mode on the same HD television setup, the Wii U versions were a big improvement visually speaking. They just weren't quite as sharp as people expected in some cases, and some systems were definitely unnecessarily dark (volume was also lower than your normal Wii U title, nothing having a TV remote nearby couldn't solve). The added save state functionality and controller button mapping were nice additions that some tend to forget to mention when talking about the Wii U Virtual Console service.

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I can't speak for the Wii U specifically, but many of the Virtual Console games on the 3DS are darkened on purpose. Hackers found a way to reverse this, so the games are as bright as they were on the original systems. I guess I could see why they would do this to Game Boy Advance games, which were made super bright to offset the dim screen of the first model, but why do it to NES or Super NES games? It's puzzling.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think it was a commercial failure, because it was disliked, not the other way around. People had their fill of that gimmicky controller on the Wii already, and U didn't have that killer game anyone (even granny) could play. If they did, it was probably to close to the Wii version.

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I think it was a commercial failure, because it was disliked, not the other way around. People had their fill of that gimmicky controller on the Wii already, and U didn't have that killer game anyone (even granny) could play. If they did, it was probably to close to the Wii version.

yet the switch ?
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The WiiU couldn't have been that bad, when most of the Switch library is WiiU ports ;)

 

I really like the WiiU, but I probably wouldn't have one if they had announced back in the day that BotW was going to the Switch.

 

I think I like it in the same way that people like the 5200 or the 7800: the library isn't huge, but the games it does have are really great, and it's easy to collect for. There's very little third-party shovelware, although I do feel like the eShop is mostly indie games that I already own on PC.

 

Wii backwards compatibility is cool, but it's kind of annoying that you can't play most games without turning on your TV or digging out the Wiimotes.

 

The Miiverse was one of the coolest things ever, and now it's gone :(

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The big hitters from Nintendo themselves got fair coverage with the Selects program and can be found new relatively easily for under the $20 MSRP.

 

Not too many got missed in our country, with Mario Kart 8 and the New Super Mario Brothers double pack probably the two biggest ones that would've been logical to rerelease as a Selects title (Although in hindsight, it's no great shock that Wii U Mario Kart 8 escaped a budget rerelease program; I've already seen complaints of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze being priced at $60 when the Wii U original is $19.99 thanks to having been in the 1st round of Selects rereleases).

 

The Selects packaging also is one of the better looking ones for these rerelease lines in my opinion (I know some people care about this a lot, for some peculiar reason). And I do like that the spines are unchanged from the original releases, so they fit in just fine on a shelf.

Edited by Atariboy
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  • 4 weeks later...

All in my opinion.

 

The Wii U was the last real games console. The rest of the generation became glorified PCs with all the negative connotations that entails. It has a small selection of games that were mostly first party platform exclusives (a magnitude more than the Xbox One has!), and the overall quality of those games is pretty bloody stellar. Evidenced by the Switch sales as the vast majority of releases on it are Wii U ports (inc BOTW).

 

However it was scuppered by a few things:

 

1) Marketing - What is it?! Many people thought it was an upgraded Wii, so why bother. Nothing was particularly clear on that point.

2) Cost - Mainly down to that controller. It was a hugely expensive machine and the peripherals were even worse.

3) 3rd party support - Sadly, it mattered and people not being able to play FiFA and all the other annual re-skinned favourites as that's what sells.

 

It's a crying shame as I love the Wii U, much more so than the XBone (which I sold) and the PS4 (which annoys me by the way it does things). I'll be the first to admit that the battery life of the controller is shit though. I ended up forking out for the bigger battery. A trend that continued as you tend to keep forking out for things on the Wii U, especially controllers, making it a very expensive machine all told. But as said above, the few titles that used the controller well, really benefited from it. I'm not sure it was worth it though. I think a Wii U bundled with a pro controller (the best controller ever made) and at £100 less would have sold much, much better.

 

I'm not sure anyone actively dislikes the Wii U, that's a bit weird. I can understand being salty at Nintendo's abandonment of it and subsequently trying to bury it on release of the Switch. That catalogue of games have proved the Switch's power, and the ability to constantly drip feed the market with them has been crucial to it's success. It's just a shame the U had to take one for the team in that regard so the Switch could seemingly have all these 'new' games. I'm especially salty that they relented and put arenas back in Mario Kart battle mode after we screamed for them and were told that 'that's not what you want'. BAH!

Still... I love it. I have no requirement for a portable so I'm quite happy running on my unloved console rather than swapping it out for the Switch.

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The Wii U was the last real games console. The rest of the generation became glorified PCs with all the negative connotations that entails.

At the end of the day a PC is just a CPU/bus/Ram/graphics, same as any other console. Why does it get singled out for being 'different'? These AMD-based consoles have custom operating environments that shields users from most PC-style headaches.

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At the end of the day a PC is just a CPU/bus/Ram/graphics, same as any other console. Why does it get singled out for being 'different'? These AMD-based consoles have custom operating environments that shields users from most PC-style headaches.

 

Agreed, and it's not like the Wii U didn't do all the same things the other ones did, including updates, DLC, online services and extended functionality (that can and did get shut down), etc. It's funny how some people like to differentiate things they really like versus things they don't particularly like.

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The marketing exists to tell you what it does and why you want it. If the marketing department can't come up with a good way to do that, that's a failure of the product, not the marketing.

 

The "why I want it" part is something I try and ignore with marketing. I don't want or need someone telling me why I want or need some product. I will want something and buy something in my own time, for my own reasons.

 

I found the Wii U to be big, cumbersome, and perhaps "too much". Trying to do too much. And not using the secondary screen in a useful & creative way. Not that it was needed in the first place. It felt like a leftover from the dot-com era.

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