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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?
Why is this story given the Microsoft icon?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.