Friday 21 February 2014

GR Strips - Wii Would Like To Pay U Off


The next instalment of "GR Strips" featured over at GameRevolution, this time we look into the possible reason as to why Nintendo's Wii U console isn't doing so well...

Okay. Being realistic, it's not Sony's doing and they're not that evil. There's no dark room conspiracies or brief cases filled with a huge of money. I think. Don't get me wrong, I love Nintendo and I love the Wii U. I've been a big Nintendo fan ever since I was a little kid. I remember my brothers and I got the first Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas, twenty one years ago. Been Nintendo fans ever since.

As much as I love the Wii U and its potential, it's very sad to see that compared to other consoles it's not doing so well. It really is a great machine and it does have a lot of potential. My brother and I loved Zombi U, one of the launch titles back in late 2012. My brother wrote an excellent blog entry about Zombi U to coincide with our strip based on Zombi U.

Despite how good (or at least how good we thought it was) Zombi U was, it's a shame that there will not be a sequel and it's an even bigger shame to see that many third party developers are avoiding the Wii U, leaving it up to the Big N to try and save its own console. While the 3Ds is doing very well, the Wii U's sales have been so poor that the president of Nintendo, Saturo Iwata has taken a pay cut of half of his salary, which is a lot of money. I think it's a very good and honourable thing of Saturo to do and really, I doubt he's missing out on much.

There's a lot of reasons why the Wii U isn't doing so well. In my opinion, I believe marketing was the biggest issue. See here in Australia, the Wii U wasn't advertised at all. I never saw it on television, in the shops or anything. No posters or anything. As it came closer to the release date sure I started seeing that stuff, but no one except for gamers and Nintendo fans actually knew what the Wii U was.

Nintendo decided to target the casual gamers with the Wii and while I hated most Wii games because of it, the Wii was a huge hit and made a lot of money. The Wii U was designed to go back to the hardcore gamers, to go back to the original fans... so this left all those casual gamers scratching their heads at the Wii U. People asked me "What is the Wii U?" and I got questions like "Is it like the DS?" "Do I use my iPad with it?" "Is it like an iPad?" "Is it a new accessory for my Wii?" No one had any idea that it was actually a brand new console.

That's where I think Nintendo failed. No one knew what a Wii U was so no one bought it. Well, that's a lie, people did buy it but not as many as Nintendo would have liked. On top of that, while the Wii U's power is on par with the PS3 and X-Box 360, I believe it was a little too late for the Wii U to be released, as the PS4 and X-Box One were already way in development and were released one year after the Wii U. Both latter consoles have been booming with sales, with the PS4 in particular.

As much as I love Nintendo and the Wii U, I am deeply saddened by its lack of success compared to the other consoles. We can only hope that its future games (such as Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros, the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, X etc.) will help deliver more sales to the console, which may encourage third party developers to return to Nintendo.

It's a great console. It just needs a little more love.

-Craig (Cr33g)