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Is the Wii U Already Dead?
kube00 writes "The Wii U has been struggling as of late. Even Nintendo has admitted sales haven't been as high as they would like. So what went wrong? Is this just a fluke? Will the Wii U recover and bounce back? Will the PS4 and the next 360 come out the door and leave the Wii U in the dust? GoozerNation takes a look at some of the NPD's and speculates on what it all means."
They've cruised on their name, they've went with gimmicks, they've stubbornly stuck with being the kids console, they've put only a half-hearted effort into online play, they've all-but-resigned themselves to staying in the last gen, etc. And, most woefully of all, they seem to have put little to no thought into WHERE THEY FIT IN NOW.
Methinks they need something they probably haven't had in a long time--a conclave of their board and big-wigs to ask themselves some fundamental questions about what their mission is, how they are going to accomplish it, and how they're going to compete in the modern gaming market.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I would have bought one already if it was a little cheaper. Nintendo stuff is supposed to be cheap and cheerful. $349 is too much, and the $299 version is too crippled to justify even building much less buying.
Drop $50 and I will take one today.
Why is this story given the Microsoft icon?
I've had Nintendo consoles since the original. I've also had XBoxes and the PS3. The Wii U actually confused me when it came out because it seemed more like it was a new handheld/portable. Not the new console and Wii replacement. I don't know if it was my complete lack of caring towards it, or their poor marketing. On the other hand I read all about the PS4 release and have been pondering the new XBox.
I feel like Nintendo just wasn't on the ball with this generation of consoles.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I think actually their primary problem now, in 2013, is that their business is making games consoles. It doesn't matter whether it's cheap, has "gimmicks" (can we lay that one to rest BTW? Innovation isn't gimmickry, the DS killed the PSP, and the introduction of the Wii basically forced Microsoft to go in a new direction), or anything else. The problem is they're making games consoles. And the concept really doesn't have anywhere to go, not usefully anyway.
If I wanted something more powerful than a Wii I'd have already bought am Xbox 360. But in all honesty, what I want has changed in the last five years. We have tablets and smartphones. Our PCs are no longer hooked up to 15-19" CRTs, they have 1080p 25" widescreens. Oh, and the PCs have Steam on them.
Given these entertainment options, the attractiveness of a locked down box you plug into the living room TV, requiring the consent of the entire household to do so, to play games is really going out of the window.
Sony and Microsoft need to take note, because realistically, unless their next game consoles are significantly different from the box-with-controllers-and-some-way-to-insert-a-game-and-a-TV-out model, they'll flop too.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It seems like the next generation MS and Sony consoles essentially run high-end commodity PC x86(-64) hardware with Blu-Ray drives and huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4). No more Cell, powerpc, whatever have you and horrible graphics memory limitations (like 256MB, wtf).
So yeah, porting for those and PC will be relatively painless while the Wii U is stuck with Xbox 360 launch specs.
Nintendo has missed the boat.
Because a lot of family-friendly and all-ages content shows up on the Wii, and as every teenager will tell you, 'all-ages' and 'family-friendly' is just code for 'games for babies'
Nintendo doesn't seem to have a good answer for "who is the market for this device?" It's not hardcore gamers. And the casual gamers that made the Wii a success have moved on to iPads and smart phones.
Nintendo needs to go somewhere that their competiors are not. In my opinion, they should be working with the Occulus Rift people to develop a box which can be worn as a backpack, which ties into the goggles. The VR Boy 2... They could concede lower quality graphics, but very, very low latency input and output to make the most of the VR hardware and minimize motion sickness effects. They already know a lot about building appropriate controllers. If this was well done, they could make the XBox and Playstation seem totally out of date. The way games used to be played, where you looked at the virtual world through a glowing rectangle with a plastic strip around it.
and Nintendo is seemingly unaware.
Every kid I know want's either a smartphone or tablet. From my observation the only people playing consoles anymore are teenagers and adults that grew up with consoles many of which are increasingly shifting their attention to mobile. The younger kids have ditched their DSi for iTouches over the last two years and are playing casual and social games. When I visit family I am bombarded by nephews and nieces that want to play my iPad.
Nintendo is trying with a tablet but doing it horribly wrong. Instead of focusing on their hardware they need to focus on their software on established mobile hardware and ecosystems.
Every year more mobile devices activate than all consoles sold combined. Mobile devices also iterate with a much higher frequency. Most modern mobile devices are fully capable of rendering any Nintendo title if adapted for it.
My prediction is none of the new consoles will sell as well as the prior version and all will likely flop. They will fail for the reason that they focus on a living room that has become mostly vacant.
It doesn't help that Nintendo apparently can't comprehend software to save their miserable lives. They can make games; but their grasp of the non-game software components is tragicomedic even compared to Sony, and that's saying something.
DRM is always user-hostile; but Nintendo's is just hilarious(even as their consoles are markedly easier to crack than Sony's or Microsoft's). Downloaded material is permanently locked to the hardware it was downloaded on. Even now that the Wii U has 'Nintendo network accounts' those are locked to the device they were created on. There is a transfer process for certain sorts of material; but it's the most ass-backwards and error-prone exercise one can imagine. Even better, the 'virtual' Wii within the Wii U, for backwards compatibility, counts as a separate device and is almost entirely non-integrated. It's just terrible at every step.
Sony's 'well, we could download updates in the background; but instead we'll make you watch' also isn't a masterpiece, and Microsoft is clearly sucking at the ad-money teat a bit too much in laying out their atrocious 'dashboard'; but that's at least evil rather than cluelessness.
Hi, parent here.
I can buy a Wii for a lower price than the XBox or PS. I'm 8 years from angsty teenagers, so I don't have to deal with the desire for mature rated games for a long time. The Wii games are more fun for the tipsy adults when we have friends over.
The Wii U doesn't appeal to me because it looks more complicated and it costs more than twice as much. Talk to me when it is $150. I'd also prefer it didn't have big easy-to-break-looking, drain-its-batteries-all-the-time controller tv things.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I just traded my Wii U for a comparable Xbox/kinect system. My kids are already getting more enjoyment and use from the Xbox.
The Wii U is half baked. Maybe the hardware gets figured out by developers, and even Nintendo, but right now the shortcomings are to visible. Right from system menu navigation being so slow and frustrating that it made me not want to boot up the system. So yeah, Nintendo doesn't do well with the system software designed for their own System.
I was one of the unfortunate ones to get a system that kept locking up - luckily after over a week being sent from the East to West then back East, I got a working system - but while the system didn't crash anymore, it was still a pain to navigate, and the games were underwhelming.
It actually wasn't an easy decision to trade the system. Nintendo may work everything out... The gamepad was a unique feature, but not so unique now that Microsoft seems committed to "SmartGlass." But my final decision to give up on the Wii U came down to the kids --- do I get a system they can have fun and variety with now, or do I pay $60 - $70 for half baked ports that may or may not play properly and cross my fingers the kids can have a comparable experience 6 months, a year, 2 years down the road... Nintendo dropped the ball on this system...
On the other side of things -- maybe they do work it out. I had an Xbox 360 up until about 3 years ago - and the experience on the one I just traded for is much better than the one I got rid of. But I have a hard time thinking Nintendo can fully recover from this one with the PS4 and the next gen Xbox right around the corner... Add in the Steambox and the explosion of tablet gaming and it doesn't look good for the Wii U.
Sure, they came out with the Kinect. The number of good games using it? Zero.
Correction: The number of good games (series) using the Kinect is one. The Dance Central series is hands down the best use of the Kinect as a peripheral to create a game that literally could not be done any other way. The problem is the same as most games on the Wii. Most developers use motion controls as a substitution for pushing buttons instead of starting with the concept that you can do things based on movement and designing a game solely working off that basis.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
I love consoles. I like the fact that when I buy a game, I know that I'm going to be able to put it in that little box and play it without having to worry about if my box meets the system requirements of the game or if I have a strong enough cell signal to log onto the games servers or if my software version isn't compatible.
I love PCs. I like the fact that it makes it easier to download lots of games and has more function than just a console. I like 25" 1080p widescreens, but I really like hooking my PC up to my 1080p 52" TV in my living room.
I don't want either model to die, and I don't understand why so many people think that there can be only successful model. I think there are a lot of people who, like me, love consoles and don't want to see the box-with-controllers-and-some-way-to-insert-a-game-and-a-TV-out model die. There's a demand for this model, even if you don't fit into it.
You don't need to remind DS and Wii owners that Nintendo doesn't comprehend software. Even at a lower level, it's clear they don't understand the fairly common OS concept of hardware abstraction, and that they stubbornly refuse to figure it out.
The DS was released back when WPA/WPA2 was... okay, maybe not "new". When the DS was planned, yes, WPA/WPA2 was probably "new". So, the DS couldn't connect to WPA/WPA2 wifi points, only unencrypted or WEP. Fair enough. So then the DSi comes out. Hooray! It can support WPA/WPA2, finally! Except... all old DS games can't. Apparently, DS games THEMSELVES make explicit calls to the wifi hardware with no layer of abstraction between them. That is, a DS game can't just ask the console "Give me a network connection, I don't care what the underlying encryption standard is", it reads data from the OS and makes its own calls to set it up, and Nintendo couldn't even be arsed to come up with an emulation layer to trick those games into using the DSi's WPA/WPA2 network access. No, their answer is to present an entirely separate configuration screen just for DS games in the DSi interface, going so far as to start the DS emulation just to load this screen. Worse, they figured this was as good an idea as they could get, as the exact same setup STILL EXISTS IN THE 3DS!
The Wii's SDHC support, though, that's another story. At first, the Wii only supported plain SD cards (no SDHC). This worked well enough for a while, right until Guitar Hero World Tour came out. DLC songs sure ate up the size limits of non-HC SD cards quick (and Nintendo wanted to push WiiWare more), so Nintendo released a firmware update that allowed SDHC cards to work. But, of course, you can probably guess where I'm going with this: Any Wii game released before the update that supports SD cards? They couldn't figure out SDHC cards at all. Even if the console understood the card, the older games wouldn't, apparently because nobody at Nintendo bothered to look up filesystem abstraction. Hell, I only had ONE class in very, very basic OS design back in college, and even I know why this is necessary in a modern OS, yet this is a company with supposedly thirty or so years of computer experience under their belts!
I'm completely convinced that if Nintendo gave up on hardware and went third-party, they'd fail. Badly. It'd make Sega look like their old selves by comparison. From what I've seen of their crazy broken hardware ("broken" in terms of "services not directly related to playing the game"), it seems to me that Nintendo's got a very, very stubborn culture and developers who entirely depend on having complete and total communication with the hardware designers, just like the old days. In fact, it just seems like Nintendo wants to pretend like it's the old days, and that things like XBox Live, Steam, smartphones, tablets, and the internet itself don't exist.
Frankly, I say, if you've always liked Nintendo in the past, like I have, then you'd better enjoy them now while they're still around. They won't be around much longer unless they get their heads out of their asses in a timer-just-reached-100 hurry.
YOU can do whatever you want, Valve in the meantime is drowning in a firehose of cash.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Exact opposite happening here. Our Xbox 360 is collecting dust (except occasionally when the kids want to play Tekken 6) & the kids are really digging the Wii U. They play NintendoLand, Super Mario Wii U & Sonic Racing all the time. 5 player gaming that doesn't involve the internet is a big hit at our house. Personally, I'm not too big on the Wiimotes, but I love the Wii U's GamePad. I also like the fact that I can, as of this weekend, get my retro F-Zero fix while the kids are watching TV, without having to fire up an emulator. Can't wait to see what else they release on the Virtual Console.
If Tekken or possibly Mortal Kombat ever comes out for the Wii U we may as well pack the 360 up for all the use it will get.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I'd also prefer it didn't have big easy-to-break-looking, drain-its-batteries-all-the-time controller tv things.
As a Wii U owner w/ 4 children, let me just say, you're wrong on both of these points regarding the GamePad.
There is a war going on for your mind.
If I want to access my game library anywhere on the planet, I can just employ external storage. The same goes for any other form of "entertainment". This can last for as long as I like.
The only stumbling block is DRM.
Unfortunately, Steam is still DRM.
It's a really pleasant cage but it's still a cage.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the kid purchases the game by entering their credit card info... Oh wait, kids don't fucking have credit cards! Get the parent to put in their info for the kid. Problem solved. Or the kid just lies about their age like they probably do for anything else online. There are facebook pages for babies. I think Nintendo would get by ok.
Have you heard of the game "Transformers: War for Cybertron"? The Wii version is called "Transformers: Cybertron Adventures."
If you bought "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" for Wii, you might notice some substantial differences between it and the other platforms (e.g., PC). Blood and gore is practically non-existent, and the bad guys actually say "I'm sorry" after Wolverine's done tearing through them. I wish I were making that up.
There are exceptions -- take "Madworld," for example -- but by and large, "family-friendly" pretty much does mean content-neutered.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.