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Wii Outselling Wii U, Only 160,000 Units Shipped Last Quarter
rescendent writes with news that the Wii U still isn't selling very well. From the article: "Nintendo's Wii U console sold only 160,000 units worldwide during the past three months, with the company blaming a lack of first-party releases for the poor performance. Software sales for the system were just 1.3 million units. During the period Nintendo sold 90,000 Wii U consoles in Japan, 60,000 in the US and only 10,000 in Europe and Australia."
El Reg reports that the Wii sold 210,000 units in the same quarter. On the bright side, Nintendo is once again profitable.
Nintendo dragged its feet in the move to HD and is paying the price. They underestimated the time and money expense, and now their first-party releases are behind. On top of that, there's barely been any marketing for the Wii U, which has a name that implies it's an accessory for the Wii rather than a new console. The console's tablet controller doesn't offer anything that people's existing smartphones and iPads can't do better. It was likely released in reaction to the iPad (Nintendo stated in 2010 that Apple is their biggest threat). With the lack of hardware power and user base, there's nothing with which to court third-party developers, who are focused instead on the more powerful consoles coming out later this year.
Nintendo's stronghold remains handheld gaming. However, even that is under threat from smartphones. On top of what Android already supports, iOS 7 will ship with native physical controller APIs, and Apple is working with hardware manufacturers to release official attachments and wireless controllers. While the 3DS certainly won't disappear, it will be interesting to watch how well it fares among adult gamers when physical controllers become commonplace in the iPhone accessory aisle.
I find it ironic that Nintendo blames Nintendo for the slow sales of the WiiU.
Maybe the PR person who wrote that piece was/should become a politician.
I see them releasing stuff I want to play to the 3DS store every month, is it available on Wii U? Hell no.
Without games a console is USELESS
I'm regretting my purchase more and more.
All I wanted was more Mario Kart Wii, not a giant controller with a screen on it.
For the first few years, Sony's PS2 also out-sold the PS3, didn't it?
This article clearly falls within Slashdot's purview. Not everything that's "news for nerds" is about government spying...
I bought a Wii and a 3DS practically on the potential of their respective Virtual Consoles alone.
I've learned my lesson.
I dragged my feet for some time on this purchase, the console has potential, but for now the only game I've purchased for it is Lego City Undercover. The Wii U is really just a big non portable Nintendo DS. The Lego game makes great use of the gamepad, interactive map, vehicle/character catalogs, video chat, surveillance device, etc. Very likely the best Lego game so far (pretty sure we've played them all now). The problem with most of the other titles is they really don't know what to do with it, even Nintendo has yet to release a convincing title that makes it an exclusive or must have game. The saving grace is the vWii console can play all of our old titles so it still gets a fair bit of use, but the slow rate of good Wii-U releases makes me wonder; I may not bite the next time around .
If Slashdot only updated when there was a story more important than the previous one, it wouldn't update very often.
Games which I've enjoyed on the Wii:
- Link's Crossbow Training (Twilight Princess only has 3 save logs, so everyone else in the family got to play that, so instead, I just shot stuff --- bought a bunch of used copies and made wooden Wii Zappers to give to co-workers)
- Skyward Sword --- if this had downloadable content, I'd play it as a daily workout analogue
- Metroid Prime Trilogy
- Xenoblade - large areas to explore --- doing a 3rd playthrough now 'cause I missed a quest
- The Last Story --- enjoyed this despite the crossbow being aimed using a joystick (rather than the IR pointer) --- if it used motion controls, I'd still be playing it
- Red Steel 2 --- ditto DLC and workout
- The Conduit --- the conspiracy stuff got to be a bit much, couldn't bring myself to play the sequel
- Goldeneye --- much better than Quantum of Solace
- Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga --- I really like RPGs, and there's not much to choose from for the Wii....
I really want to see a full-fledged RPG for the Wii U, which has multiple control schemes, including full Motion Plus control for swordplay and archery (a la Skyward Sword, but w/ options to set handedness) which uses the tablet for mapping and additional interface options and engaging on-line play and downloadable content --- I could justify it as a workout regimen....
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Nintendo has always had a cost niche that set them apart from xbox and ps3. Why would they want to go head to head? My kids are older now and I am not going to shell out that much money because they want to play a few titles that they liked when they were younger.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Then ignore it instead of being a self-righteous douche.
I had one for a month or so. Very few games to pick from, those I tried were "meh", nothing on the level of Wii Sports for the original Wii. The screen added nothing of value, the UI is extremely slow, it really isn't much fun. And the emulator is still unable to render my old stuff in full HD - so what is the point? I really don't understand what I would want to do with a Wii U. Luckily I was able to sell mine again for almost no loss.
They are so paranoid about compatibility because of their history of designing things around fixed hardware to get the most out of it (including saving time NOT testing software for such changes.)
Nintendo could simply create an OPTION to run Wii games in full emulation mode or enhanced mode - and let the user set the option; default to the safe option. Later, with enough feedback online (a simple forum or poll online) could allow them to update their software with a list of safe games to run in enhanced mode.
OR they could continue to think like the music and movie industry and expect people to buy replacements... then NOT release HD versions of their old games-- Nintendo rarely ever remakes anything, just a few zelda games and the rest is all emulated.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Sales will pick up instantly as soon as modchips are available.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Agreed. Slashdot should only show one article a day, and it should be the one which you, vikingpower, decide to be the most important article of the day.
I really like the Wii. The motion controls system is by far gen 1, and I always figured that the successor to the Wii would have a better motion control system (perhaps something akin to the Kinect, but a little shy). Then the Wii U is announced and it turns out that the motion control system is identical. The Wii U is a Wii + a fat controller with a screen stuck between the controls.
So Nintendo back peddled on the motion control thing they had going for them, and as a result the older hardware is still outselling the new hardware because it's cheaper and does as good as the newer hardware in what people buy a Wii for. If the Wii U had a motion control system consumers considered to be an improvement over the Wii, I suspect that Wii U would be at least outselling the Wii.
ahah I see what you did there!
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Right! That's the same mentality as the stock market, I agree.
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I tried, unsuccessfully, for months after its launch to get a hands-on demo with the console. You know, fire up the latest and greatest Mario game (which I'm guessing didn't exist). I spent hundreds of dollars on previous Nintendo consoles, on launch day, because I also spent hours and hours trying the product ahead of time. I played most of Super Mario 64, in Japanese, at a local Funco Land well before it's American release and it solidified one thing: I need this console.
With the Wii U, I was unable to play hands-on (and use the controller to play a game, not just watch some videos) until a few weeks ago, when I found that Wal-Mart had a demo of New Super Mario Bros. U.
If you want people to spend hundreds of dollars on a product, give them a way to try it out for free first. Nintendo shit the bed on that one.
This doesn't even begin to address the fact that the only reason to buy a Nintendo console in modern times is for their (almost always A+) catalog of first-party titles, like Mario and Zelda, and that these won't be available for a long time.
the stupid gimmick controllers always put me off...i grew up on the original NES and love their IP but i don't want to have to use those stupid controllers. if they had made the Power Glove mandatory for the NES you can be sure Nintendo never would have survived the 80s. Nintendo releases the same 3 games over and over for 30 years and then tries to look "innovative" by putting together some cheesy controller gimmick. They need to shitcan the CEO cuz he obviously "doesn't get it".
I did want the first Wii, my kids wanted one, my wife wanted one. I dutifully got into line at 6am and got one for Christmas (The year after they came out).
So now we have the new Wii U and my kids haven't peeped about it, none of their friends have one, my wife doesn't know it exists, and Nintendo hasn't shown me anything interesting.
I am not saying that the thing is great or that it sucks. I just don't know and haven't seen anything cool about it.
Like the subject says I don't get the point of a tablet controller. It seems like switching focus away from the tv and down to the tablet would really throw people off. Now I have to worry about looking at two screens?
Nintendo did this to themselves when they abandoned hardcore gamers to cater to casual games with the Wii. That move will always come back to bite you because the casual users are fickle while hardcore gamers will get you through the rough times. And sure enough, casual gamers have moved on to Facebook, tablets, and smartphones, and Nintendo doesn't have anyone left to sell consoles. I used to buy Nintendo consoles because I could play most of the great games available on other systems as well as Nintendo's excellent titles. But ever since the Wii, Nintendo lost most of the decent third-party developers which meant that hardcore gamers would have to buy the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 to be able to play those games. When that happened, many of the developers and the gamers haven't looked back. Luckily for Nintendo, they're still selling decent numbers of portable units, but the Wii U is in serious trouble. There's no doubt that it will pick up a bit when more first-party titles come out and after an inevitable price drop, but right now most of the hype is around the Xbone and PS4. At this point, I just don't see them making a miraculous comeback and I can't help but wonder if this is their last console. If they did another console, it would have to be absolutely revolutionary - my vote is for a fully immersive virtual reality experience, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that.
You give the government far too much credit. :P
Nintendo is dead, they just don't know it yet.
160,000 units sold in a quarter usually represents an EOL console, actually Xbox360 and PS3 are selling more in spite of them being EOL. PS4 and Xbox One individual pre-sales have already surpassed Wii U total sales.
This is not a company on a comeback, this is a company in its death throes.
Nintendo made the mistake of putting ZERO R&D into the Wii U, instead just beefing up the Wii and adding a stripped down DS touchpad gimmick. If sales for Wii U consoles are this low NOW, 3rd parties are NOT going to support the platform. Heck it would even be a loss for Nintendo to invest in their own first party franchises at this point as even if every Wii U owner bought a first party title, they could still not recover development costs of the game. It would take NIntendo 5+ years to re-architect a new system that would match or rival those from Sony or Microsoft, they simply do not have it in them to do so though.
Also if Nintendo is going to do things like clone Mario Bros and call it Luigi Bros ( I mean this is so clearly a cloned title), then their consumers are going to get tired of this kind of lazy cheap ass game development quickly.
Nintendo is the next Sega. They will have to bow out of hardware because nobody wants to buy their hardware anymore, but they still have huge popularity in their software franchise. If their Japanese pride and arrogance doesn't get the best of them, then spinning off Mario and Zelda and Metroid as tablet games will be their only savior. Heck even releasing an official SNES or GameBoy emulator for the tablet might drive them to more profit then the fledgling Wii U and requires minimum investment in money and effort.
And don't be an asshat and claim they will come back from this. Unless you are 8 nobody cares about Nintendo anymore. Everyone over the age of 8 was burned by the Wii and its one trick pony, they will refuse to invest in Nintendo hardware again.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
When BluRay and HD-DVD came out, it offered better quality video to people who didn't really need it. Sure high definition was nice, but it wasn't really a good enough reason to toss out the old DVD stuff to make room for it. Besides, with video downloads and online rentals coming about, there was just not a good enough reason for it. Add to that the fact the Blu-Ray DRM was so damn restrictive that people were constantly having to update their BluRay player to handle new films....
DVD on the other hand introduced a much simpler format for viewers than VHS. It took the world by storm by adding a huge amount of value beyond earlier formats.
Wii was amazing because it added the motion controller and games like workout games and such.
Wii U doesn't actually offer anything that can be considered value. Nintendo will almost certainly destroy their entire market since Wii people just don't see the value in upgrading. We want the new games, but the cost of the console is too high.
If Nintendo really wanted to make it work, they'd have made a Wii 2 with internal storage, a simpler online game store, added backwards support for Wii games and made it HD. Wii U is just not interesting.
P.S. my friends with kids who need their first consoles are buying Wii not Wii U. The Wii U controller is too big and unmanageable for the kids.
They, I regret to say this, need to have a Balmer Moment.
I don't understand. What am I giving the government credit for?
What destroyed the Wii U for me, was the GIANT fischer Price controller.
I bought one as soon as it came out, for the HD definition part. The controller with a resistive (one touch only) screen (no multitouch) was a dodo bird. Doomed from the start.
I got the wiimote later on, and was relieved, even though I did not have a WII (the old wii...not the new Wii U). And the games (that was compatible with the Wiimote) was a lot more fun as I had to move my entire body to slash and dice with the sword. The Wii U's touch-pad...just plain old fashion sucks.
Please PLEASE Nintendo...do NOT make another mistake like that. The Wii U gamepad is probably the biggest dodobird in the world, biggest mistake ever, not even the clumsy PS3 move controllers comes close to this big mistake.
What where your developers thinking? No one even bothers making new and interesting games for this dodobird. I tried hard to think of cool things, but a single touch screen? What WAS your developers thinking?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I understand all the negative comments here, but really, it's just that Nintendo haven't provided enough reasons to purchase to get a large number of individuals on board. I've been extremely happy with each and every Nintendo system purchase I made- missing only a couple since the NES like the first generation GameBoy and the first DS- but I've been delaying a WiiU purchase. That all changes on August 4.
The Pikmin games rule, and I fully expect that one game to provide enough entertainment to my whole family to justify the WiiU price.
I guess the bit they missed was realizing that the ipad was just a games machine - did other stuff as well.
I'm never one to praise Sony, but with the VIta they at least pitched it right - we make games consoles. We've made the best portable games console we could. If you want a portable games console, please buy it.
I frankly fail to see if Nintendo think that the future is a touch screen, why they didn't just go software only. Square seem to have leapt into the tablet market with both feet, and just ignored the rest of the market and priced at the level they feel their games are worth.
Now I still feel that I'm missing out playing games on my phone, compared to a console, but with controller APIs just around the corner and the ability to shove something onto a bigger screen if you feel like it - I really can't see myself buying another console.
If I want to play a DM'd dungeon crawler there's tonnes of web apps for that on PC. Same with RTS, and it doesn't even cost much more (Starcraft I and any of the 20+ rts' on Gog with web support run fine an a low end laptop). Heck, for the RTS a Wii U costs more after buying 3 more of those tablet things.
Also, I found it annoying as heck to keep staring down at the tablet while playing Rayman Origins.
I agree with you on sports games, but that basically means EA, and I don't see EA getting behind Nintendo too strongly. Nintendo doesn't have a good track record of playing nice with their 3rd party licenses....
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Textures are more dependent on the memory available than the output resolution
More output resolution needs larger textures, and this in turn needs not only more memory (RAM) but also more memory (ROM) and faster access to the memory. In addition, more output resolution needs more geometry, and some of the shortcuts in modeling for SD/ED don't apply as well to HD in the same way that the low-definition models of Doubutsu no Mori for N64 stuck out like a sore thumb when the game was ported to the GameCube as Animal Crossing. (They fit in better in Wild World for DS, which is also low-definition.) Imagine if the Wii remake of GoldenEye 007 had stuck with the old blocky LD meshes from the N64 even with enlarged textures to cover the upgrade from 240p to 480p.
In America if a publicly traded company has a huge hit like the Wii and doesn't follow it up they get eaten alive by their investors. We even have a name for it: Bained, after Bain Capital, the company most famous for it.
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But how do you connect your old cartridges to your OUYA so that you can get legal ROMs to put into emulators? A Retrode adapter works for most Genesis and Super NES games but costs about as much as the OUYA console itself and doesn't work with NES games. If the Discover menu had a section like Wii Shop's Virtual Console, with one-click access to a large variety of well-known 8-bit games, I could understand. But I haven't seen a lot of official rereleases of classic console games on OUYA, except for the Android remake of Final Fantasy III (not VI). There are no NES-era games for sale in EMUya's DLC store, for instance, just a bunch of modern-day freeware plucked from PDRoms and NESdev. (Not that there's anything wrong with the games in particular; I enjoyed them when they originally showed up on the NESdev board. But they're not exactly close substitutes for one's favorite NES games.) EMUya publisher Oriku really needs to do deals with the major NES third parties to get content.
Left 4 Dead does a similar thing, but it requires every player to have their own copy of the game, and be sitting on their own TV, with their own console/computer, etc. Wii U could bring that concept to a single living room couch.
Some people don't want to have to gather all participants physically, especially with friends who live hundreds of miles away. I've talked to some Slashdot users who can't even coordinate schedules for an online friend match and instead prefer to play in pickup groups with strangers. Nintendo's child-friendly "friend code" policy has hurt its value proposition for stranger play.
The console's tablet controller doesn't offer anything that people's existing smartphones and iPads can't do better.
What the Wii U GamePad has that the vast majority of phones and tablets lack is physical buttons. I tried playing the demo of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on a Nexus 7 tablet and it was far more difficult to control than Super Mario Bros. 3 on my NES. I played a game that's pretty much the same thing on my cousin's OUYA console (Giana Sisters) and it was far more enjoyable.
On top of what Android already supports
It's not necessarily what Android supports as what people already own. I can think of only three name-brand Android devices that ship with a physical controller: the Sony Xperia Play gaming phone with a slide-out controller like the PSP Go, the Archos GamePad gaming tablet with buttons on the sides like an original GBA or a Wii U GamePad, and the NVIDIA Shield gaming tablet with a flip-up screen like the GBA SP. Otherwise, you have to either buy an obscure JXD gaming tablet (do those even have Google Play Store?) or buy a controller that clamps onto your phone, and I haven't seen evidence that people are going to buy a $40 controller just to play one $3 game.
iOS 7 will ship with native physical controller APIs
Because iOS 7 requires 512 MB of RAM, it won't work on any iPod touch sold before October of last year. This means any third-party controller is going to have to do keyboard emulation, like the iControlPad and iCade, in order to work with all devices that people already own.
the same ones that I saw playing Wii units and Nintendo handhelds are now playing angry Birds on their tablets and have replaced their handhelds with a smartphone
Was this true of Smash Bros. fanatics as well? What HTPC game replaces Brawl, for example?
You don't think they bothered putting the old hardware somewhere on that R700-series GPU do you?
Actually, I think they did. After 12 years of process shrinks, a GameCube GPU wouldn't occupy much die space.
Hello.... If they came out with more Wii-U games maybe they would sell more consoles. Why would you buy the Wii-U so you can play the old Wii games???
Another thing that would help boost Wii-U sales, stop selling the wii. Now that there is rocket science at its best!
The possibility of glitches on games that haven't gone through QA in the emulator is why Microsoft authorized the Xbox 360's official Xbox emulator only for about half the Xbox library.
The analogy to PNG vs. SVG isn't perfect, as SVG uses Bezier paths that are defined as the limit of a tesselation process. Old-school 3D games, on the other hand, use triangles or quadrilaterals as the primitive and most weren't coded with real-time tesselation in mind. Would you want to play GoldenEye 007 with blocky N64 models at 1080p? Sometimes you really do need more geometry to make a scene look good in high definition. Besides, roundoff error often leads to gaps between polygons when things are upscaled.
What first party exclusives were available on day one of the PlayStation 2 launch? It was pretty much just FantaVision, and that's been described as "a steaming pile of tech demo and nothing more."
you had to regularly (sometimes every ten or so minutes) have to recalibrate the [Wii MotionPlus sensor].
But was that any worse than having to rest your eyes every few minutes with a Virtual Boy or 3DS?
Since I'm in pretty much the same boat. I haven't bought a new game since like 2010 (X3TC for the record), and having chosen to take the mentality 'If it doesn't come with a disk and without online activation, it's not worth playing.' I've found surprisingly little left to buy at this point. There's a few Star Wars games that have remained on the shelf (Although between the LA closure, and selling to disney, they're not getting my money anymore either.), but EVERY SINGLE OTHER game requires either Battle.Net, Origin, Steam, or an Online subscription (I'm including Guild Wars in this last one, since if the servers ever shut down your software is now worthless.)
As it is thanks to the 'consumption' mentality that has infected games a few '06-'09 games I have are similiarly hobbled, having relied on gamespy for matchmaking and without client-side server options to allow players to continue running after the services were discontinued. Long story short, other than the occasional indulgence in F2P mmos or the occasional Open Source game (A number of which are getting quite impressive nowadays.) my purchasing/playing habits have almost totally dried up.
I notice there are two types of people, people that own a Wii U and love it, but wish there were more games, and then there is everyone else who seems to have no clue what the system is about or what the features of the system are. Someone compared it to an iPad? lol seriously go find someone with a wii U and actually sit down and play it. When the games come, the tune will change. I've loved every game I've played on it so far. The controller is actually bad ass and a great feature, especially the remote play. I keep finding myself wishing my other systems had the same functionality. Hell, nvidia created a dedicated product just for that.
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