Nintendo admits the Wii U is failing

[Dungeoneer]

I'm a pretty big Nintendo fanboi. If it says 'Mario' or 'Zelda' on the cover, I'll buy it. I was the first on my block to buy the original Wii, and I loved it. I still pull it out from time to time. But when they announced the Wii U, I thought "Hmm, that's kinda weird. Well, I'll just wait until there's some good games for it." Two years on and there are still pretty much no games for it. I could still be the first on my block to buy a Wii U, though, because I've never met anyone who actually owns one!

It's been obvious for a while to anyone who isn't Nintendo that nobody was asking for an underpowered 'next gen' console or a ginormous tablet controller. But today Nintendo finally admitted it has a big problem:

The company's operating profit of 100 billion yen ($958 million) that was predicted at the start of the financial year has become an operating loss of 35 billion yen (around $335 million).

Yowch.

Nintendo is apparently considering some radical moves:

“We are thinking about a new business structure,” Iwata said at a press conference today in Osaka, Japan. “Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.”

Nintendo on smartphones!

Or maybe what the Wii U needs to get going is a big price cut. One way to do that would be to sell it without that silly gamepad.

Although Nintendo launched Wii U with NintendoLand (a suite of mini-games that all required the GamePad controller), most of its current crop of games and everything in the foreseeable future do not actually require the pad. If anything, I thought playing Pikmin 3 with the Wii remote and nunchuk was preferable to the GamePad. I played Super Mario 3D World with the classic controller, only using the touchscreen when the game absolutely required me to. Nintendo is adding a couple of little touches to these games that use the GamePad’s second screen, but by and large they are optional. Mario Kart and Donkey Kong, coming next year, don’t look to be changing that paradigm.

Purely based on where Nintendo is going with its software lineup, GamePad is becoming an optional accessory. All that’s left is to make it an optional purchase. If selling GamePad separately might allow Nintendo to reduce the price of Wii U to just under $200 (with a game pre-installed on the console for extra value, of course) it would look much more appealing next to the $400 PS4 and $500 Xbox One.

Of course a price cut isn't enough to sell a console. You gotta have games. Unfortunately, it seems that Nintendo managed to scare off a lot of third party developers early on. If you haven't read it already, there is an amazing behind-the-scenes article by a developer for a Wii U launch title that details just a few of the hardships third party developers faced:

Around this time we got the chance to talk to some more senior people in Nintendo, via a phone conference, as they were gathering feedback on our development experiences and their toolchain. This phone conference gave an interesting insight into Nintendo and how it appears to operate.

<snip>*snip*

We probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?

Underpowered. Weird controller. Crappy third party support. Very few first party games. The Wii U may wind up making the GameCube look good.

Nintendo needs to make a turn around quick. Should they try more radical price cuts? Just cut their losses and rush out the Super Wii U? Or is it time to set Mario free to roam on iPhones and the XBox One?</snip>

 

[trappedslider]

IMO Nintendo should do what Sega did and just go into software for the other consoles

 

[darjr]

is the wii u backwards compatible? it mike make an ok hd wii if the price comes down

 

[Dungeoneer]

is the wii u backwards compatible? it mike make an ok hd wii if the price comes down

I believe the Wii U is backward compatible with the Wii.

Cleverly, they make you re-purchase any virtual console games you bought on your Wii.

 

[darjr]

oh! how 'clever'

I don't think I have many, if I could get a wii u without the tablet at a discount, I might

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I was just shopping for one for a relative who is under doctor's orders to buy one ( ), and yes, they are backwards compatible. Supposedly, the old Wii controllers will work with it as well.

 

[PigKnight]

They're backwards compatible. I'm waiting to hear more about Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem before buying a WiiU.

 

[Janx]

This news doesn't surprise me.

I had predicted that it was the Wii generation that was a big failure, because it stuck too much to low tech and non-adult games.

That the Wii was successful had more to do to the wii-mote gimick and its price-point for casual gamers.

Since the Wii-U is more of the same it, the wave is over and the variables to Nintendo's failure seem to have aligned with the reasoning of my prediction.

i didn't make any money off that prediction, so my eventually being right is worth exactly that much

 

[PigKnight]

It also doesn't help that bad marketing led people to think the WiiU was just the new controller and not a new hardware upgrade.

 

[Kaodi]

I wonder if the price point of extra game pads is itself part of the problem. I mean, I guess there is online play, but think about tabletop games: a lot of mechanics rely on hiding your "hand" from the other players, which is prohibitively expensive for a family to do for the same single console.

Maybe the sort of game they should be looking to for a little inspiration in that department is Hearthstone.