Can the Wii U Survive Against the PS4 and Xbox One?

An anonymous reader writes "Now that both Sony and Microsoft have announced their next-gen consoles, and we've gotten solid information about their hardware, technology, and features, Eurogamer asks whether Nintendo's struggling Wii U will be able to hold its own once the new competition arrives. 'Wii U has tanked — there's no other way to put it — with even the release of traditional big-hitters like Dragon Quest 10 failing to make a dent in the Japanese market. If you believe certain analysts, April saw things getting even worse in the U.S. with the Wii U shifting under 40,000 units, easily outsold by the 360 and PS3 — and, even more embarrassingly, the Wii.' If the Wii U doesn't see a miraculous turnaround, Nintendo may be left with the difficult choice of whether to port its software to competing consoles. It'll also serve as a bellwether to see if the big gamer complaint about the new Sony and Microsoft consoles — that they're only partly about games — is honest. 'At a time when the goal of its competitors is to own the living room, the extent of Nintendo's ambition is simply to be in it — a dedicated games console, and no more.'"

Comments

Re:They're going for gameplay. Again.

[drinkypoo]

The thing is, the Wii is a runty little console which offered little over its predecessor, which had awful controllers, and really shitty motion recognition in spite of the motion recognition being the primary feature. With motionplus it is not too bad, but because the system is so pathetic games have to explicitly support it, it's not automatic. So only some games even have halfway decent motion detection. Most of Nintendo's own Wiimote titles don't even try to do anything interesting, e.g. the original Zelda title where you just wiggle the wiimote to swing the sword. They didn't re-release those with decent controls either. Consequently there's only a small handful of titles which ever really delivered on the promise of the Wii, and most of them don't have much replay value. End result, I am a gamer and my Wii is still just used as a Netflix box. And it's not a very good one of those, with its primitive output (480p? What year did that console come out again?) and recently, its tendency to crash and make a noise like an air horn. It's better at Netflix than it is at Amazon Instant Video though, which runs fine on my PC but buffers every few seconds on the Wii.

The Wii was a brilliant marketing manouever but it's a fairly crap console, poorly implemented. It sold on the basis of the Nintendo name and if it didn't play Netflix I would regret the purchase immensely. As it is, I have got lots of use out of it on that basis. If only the wiimote weren't pathetically confused by the open windows in my living room, and I didn't have to get up and stand halfway between the couch and the TV to actually launch netflix any time but in the dark of night, I might even say it has a decent remote. But it is, so I won't, because it doesn't.

Angrily defending the Wii like you're doing is the sign of a fanboy, and I say this as someone who shakes his fist at Nintendo every time they try to sneak a HBC defeat into a system update, threatening the function of my original Gamecube-friendly Wii. But don't get mad, bro. At least, not on Nintendo's behalf. They're a corporation, they don't care about you. They just want your money.