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Nintendo Ending Wii U Production Later This Year, Says Report (polygon.com)
An anonymous reader cites a Polygon article: Nintendo will end production on its Wii U console sometime in 2016. The console, which has sold poorly compared to its wildly successful predecessor, debuted in 2012. According to Nikkei's report, Nintendo has already stopped manufacturing certain Wii U accessories. The outlet, which has a good record of reporting on Nintendo's unannounced plans, reports that while Wii U hardware is being discontinued, a launch of the company's next platform -- codenamed NX -- is not guaranteed this year. Nintendo plans to unveil its next-generation console sometime in 2016. The company launched its first mobile app, Miitomo, last week.
Title says it all; seriously, partner with Apple. They can amp up the next AppleTV and make a killer platform for Nintendo signature franchises (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc). Nintendo doesn't have the marketshare that Apple has with iOS development, and another console isn't going to compete against an all-in-one home entertainment device such as the AppleTV. As an old-school NES / SNES gamer, watching Nintendo drag this on in obstinance is agonizing! SEGA did the right thing folding their hardware development, but they faltered really badly on the title delivery side of things thereafter. But such a Apple/Nintendo partnership would be HUGE for both of them.
Life is not for the lazy.
The first Wii was different and innovative enough that it brought non-gamers in. But they lost focus with their core audience, some of whom don't even buy the console until there's enough games to justify the high cost.
I'm a platform gamer, primarily, and don't have time to try out new or innovative games. Starting with N64, they went to one Mario game of each "type" at most per platform. And with 3DS and Wii U they did a total of two types. With Wii, there was Super Mario Galaxy which even got a sequel. I own a total of 3 games for the Wii U and don't feel like there's anything else there for me.
They need to admit that Homebrew made them popular (unfortunately in small part to piracy). And I copied all of my Wii games to a hard drive for convenience - that still works on the vWii side of the Wii U, but the U side hasn't been opened up at all.
Bought one of these for my son and the controller lcd cracked... what a poorly thought out product (both by maker and buyer!) Anyone that has owned consoles know that controllers all die at some point. So lets make a console for children with a controller that costs 180 bucks to replace....
love is just extroverted narcissism
...Oh well, I hope Netflix will keep supporting it, because (and I have ALL the other consoles + pc) it is the BEST, smoothest Netflix experience you'll ever have.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
the huge Wii U LCD/controller seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Did you see the announcement video for it? The President of Nintendo talked about how their goal with the successor of the Wii was to get all of the members of the family interacting with each other, instead of everyone living in their own little bubble (ie, staring at the small screen in their hand). What amazed me by that, is that Nintendo solved that problem with the Wii. Some of the best times on the Wii is spent with four people all holding one cheap controller, looking at the same spot, or at each other as they perform silly actions to accomplish the games task. Then when they introduced the Wii U GamePad, they all of a sudden made one person to be different than the others, and in their own little bubble. They already had the solution to the problem they claimed they were trying to solve, and then ran backwards.
So the Wii-U more or less failed. Not quite as horribly as it seemed that it might at some points. As of right now, it's sold 12.5 million units, which is a few million ahead of the Dreamcast and Saturn, but almost 10 million behind the Gamecube. The PS4 and Xbox One both blew it out of the water. I don't think there's any one reason for this, but there are a lot of factors that all contributed:
1) The name. This was a really bad choice, as it didn't clearly differentiate the console as a sequel to the Wii, rather than an add-on for it. This caused confusion in the market, particularly in the casual/family market that supported the Wii. What's bizarre is that Nintendo had already been stung by this once, with the 3DS.
2) The timing. This was about as badly wrong as could have been imagined. The Wii had been dead in the water since 2010 or so. A successor late-2010 with the Wii-U's capabilities, when the successors to the PS3 and 360 were still years away, might have had a chance. But to launch with dated hardware (more on this later) at a time when Sony and MS were already spinning up their hype-machines for much more powerful consoles was suicidal.
3) Terrible launch marketing. The Wii-U launched in the run up to Christmas, which is an obvious enough choice, but had a near-invisible marketing campaign. It ended up getting buried by games such as Call of Duty in the pre-Christmas rush.
4) The wrong hardware. We know now from reports from ex-Nintendo staff that the company's key priority for the console was low power usage and noise and a small form factor; to make the thing an unobtrusive part of the living room. That's not a bad goal in itself, but it shouldn't have been taken to the extremes it was. A horribly underpowered CPU meant that in some respects, the Wii-U was outgunned by the (already elderly) PS3 and 360. Porting to the platform was also complicated.
5) A poorly designed gamepad with no clear USP. I've owned a Wii-U since launch and I still don't really understand the point of the gamepad. Very few games have made good use of it. It's unergonomic (just google "Wii U gamepad hand pain"), imprecise, cheap-feeling and, most bizarrely of all, virtually irreplaceable without buying a new console. The Wii sold tens of millions of copies on the quick-draw appeal of the Wii-mote, even if the potential of motion controls proved horribly limited in the longer run. The Wii-U, by contrast.
6) Terrible third-party relationships. This has long been a problem for Nintendo. They have a reputation in the industry as being arrogant and high-handed towards third-party developers. They promised this would improve with the Wii-U. It didn't. In fact, they royally pissed off a lot of the big names by failing to support their own launch so badly. Some publishers, particularly Ubisoft, invested heavily in the Wii-U launch, only to have their titles crash and burn because Nintendo didn't seem willing to put the effort into growing the installed base.
7) Underwhelming first-party games. This is the controversial one. The Wii-U does have some good exclusives, developed on a first or second party basis, but by and large, it has an insipid lineup. New Super Mario Brothers U and 3D Mario World were second-rate titles at best. Popular Gamecube and Wii series like Metroid went AWOL. Nintendo has a reputation for being an innovative games developer, but this reputation is largely misplaced. Its Wii-U library was generally composed of inferior retreads of familiar ground. There were one or two more innovative late-cycle games, like the first-party Splatoon and the second-party Xenoblade Chronicles X, but those were too little, too late.
The question is whether Nintendo can really fix all of the above problems with the NX, particularly given that they are, once again, going with a tricky mid-cycle launch (and that third parties have essentially given up on them).
The Wii did very well in the console arena, and both Sony and MS scrambled to copy the motion controls. They just didn't amp the Wii U up enough to continue competing this generation.
I don't think that the motion control was the main selling point (though it did help a bit reach the target market, by distancing itself from hardcore platform, and by lowering the entry barrier using more intuitive gestures instead of complex controllers with more buttons than pimples on their nerdy users' faces).
I think that the main success of the Wii was due to targeting a completely different market, one which wasn't targeted yet (by console manufacturer, at least. That market is Apple's and Android's bread and butter):
the casual players.
Whereas XBox360 and PS3 targetted hardcore players (and people needing HD-DVD and Bluray players), the Wii was targetting people who weren't into games yet, and might be not attracted by the newest iteration of {insert_favorite_platformer}, but who would like casual and party games like Wii Sport and all the new franchises started around the Wii.
That was the main success of the Wii (suddenly all the pops and moms buying consoles), but also its main culprit:
- those casual player aren't that much interested into buying a new console every 24 months just because the new one has more CPU. They're just happy keeping the previous Wii around, and dusting it off and pop-in some party games whenever they have visitors around.
- the motion controls look (and are actually) simpler than a complex multi-game pad gamepad. The Wii-U's pad with its screen looks *much more complex*. That has probably put off a lot of casual gamer who don't very well understand what it is about.
(Nintendo should probably spent more communication effort in helping understand what this new invention brings as features).
In short:
- it's wasn't that difficult for Nintendo to find a way to sell new type of games to people who aren't used to buy them before (Wii success)
- it's much more difficult to get the same people who aren't used to buy a new console regularly and them buy an upgraded device (Wii-U flop)
Hand held arena is still nintendo for the discrete gameplay device. Smartphones may be ubiquitous but you still see people putting a lot of playtime into their 3DS.
There *are* still people putting a lot of time on 3DS. Mainly hardcore players, because nothing beats console's controller interface to play platformers and the like.
BUT
There are even way more people playing on their smartphones.
If you're a hardcore player and want to play {insert_favorite_platformer} while on the go, a 3DS/New 3DS is the platform to go.
But if you're just bored on public transportation and want to kill time, you just get out your smartphone and play a few rounds of whatever latest casual game has come out of PopCap/Zynga/and the likes. Your 5-minute time killer simply doesn't look wort shelling out the money for a portable console, when you already have the perfect platform in you pocket. (Although actually, some we'll end-up shelling out even more money in freemium payment than that).
Nintendo did try some non-hardcore games (all the various brain trainer seem like a direct mirror of Wii Sport) but with much limited success.
In home console, the casual/non-hardcore market was almost completely untapped, so Nintendo had a great success attracting them to the Wii.
While on the go, the casual/non-hardcore market was already been caterred to by the various app stores on smartphones.
The 3DS and New 3DS have completely dominated over the other portable console (like portable playstations). But that is completely dwarfed when compared to smartphone casual game usage.
I've seen people demand nintendo drop out of the hardware business ever since the sega genesis, and it's always a fanboy of the competition who hates "kiddy nintendo" but drools over the games they have.
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