I keep seeing people dunk on the Wii U like it was garbage just because it sold poorly, but honestly, the Wii U walked so the Switch could run.
Yeah, it was a financial flop, I’m not arguing that. But looking back, it wasn't a bad product, it was just an idea that arrived five years too early. The GamePad literally pioneered the whole concept of "Off TV Play" and hybrid gaming. The Switch is basically just a perfected version of what the Wii U was trying to do.
Plus, Nintendo was actually accountable back then. When the Wii U OS was sluggish at launch, they didn’t just ignore it, they released the 3.0.0 U update and actually filmed a side by side video to prove they fixed the load times. You rarely see that level of transparency from them now. And the library was stacked, Smash, Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Xenoblade X, Pokkén. People act like it had no games, but most of the Switch's early years were just porting Wii U games that people missed.
The biggest downgrade with "modern" Nintendo, though, is backward compatibility. It’s actually trash compared to what other companies are doing.
Look at Microsoft, they are doing backward compatibility the best right now. On the Series X, I can still play my old Xbox 360 games whether I have the disc or own them digitally. I don't need a membership just to open a game I already bought. Even crazier, the online support is still active for a lot of them (you might still need the 9.99 Game Pass Core to access online for the Xbox games, but still the backwards compatibility is better than Nintendo and Sony). Me and my friends still hop on Grand Theft Auto 4 and all the old Call of Duty games like Black Ops 2, Black Ops 1, MW2, and MW3. The servers are up and we can just play.
Meanwhile, Nintendo has locked their legacy content behind the NSO "subscription jail." You can't even buy these games individually anymore. You’re just renting them, and if you stop paying, you lose your saves and access. It’s anti consumer as hell.
We’re missing so much, too. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were full priced remakes that ignored all the best content from Platinum, like the Battle Frontier. And where are the GBA classics? We have a GBA app on Switch, so why can’t I play Emerald or FireRed?
The Wii U failed financially, but at least it had soul. Modern Nintendo feels like they know they’re "too big to fail" now, so they can get away with charging us rent for games we should be able to just buy.
by Storm_Raijin
13 Comments
Blah blah blah
I don’t think the Wii U was a bad console concept-wise, but it suffered from the following:
1. It wasn’t clear to many casual audiences that the Wii U was a new console rather than a new controller for the Wii. In the initial marketing, they never said the words “new console” and never even showed off the console itself–just the controller.
2. I do think the utility of being able to continue playing a game just a bit far from the console wasn’t as useful as Nintendo thought it would be. I would have loved it as a kid since I often couldn’t use the TV in the room I had the console in, but in the grand scheme of things that’s somewhat of a niche situation. There were adults playing it who had their own TVs and even kids often had a TV in their room or just a separate room in the house.
3. Piggybacking off of (2), even the concept for the console could be a bit awkward. Having to look back and forth between a screen in your hands and a screen on the TV can be a bit weird. It’s not like the DS where both screens are in front of you. This makes it challenging for third party developers to make games for the console, since it would have to be pretty different from other consoles, and it’s also a bit weird because if you need two screens for a game doesn’t that mean you can’t play it in handhold mode only?
4. Lack of games. There just weren’t enough big first party Nintendo games and since for the reasons above third party developers weren’t on board, the console just didn’t have good games. A lot of the success of a console is determined in the first 2 years.
So I guess given (2) and (3) I do walk back my first sentence a bit. I do think the console did have some conceptual flaws, but I don’t think that’s what doomed it. I think it was just the lack of games and poor marketing.
How could they do backwards compatibility for older consoles? Every Xbox uses standard optical disks, how would you expect to play Wii U games on a Switch? Not to mention the physical incompatibilities in the lack of the second screen, and architectural incompatibilities.
>Plus, Nintendo was actually accountable back then. When the Wii U OS was sluggish at launch, they didn’t just ignore it, they released the 3.0.0 U update and actually filmed a side by side video to prove they fixed the load times.
The fact that they had to do that at all is a bad thing. What would they need to be accountable for now in a similar way? There aren’t really any big flaws with their current UI like that.
>And the library was stacked, Smash, Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Xenoblade X, Pokkén. People act like it had no games, but most of the Switch’s early years were just porting Wii U games that people missed.
Those good games were released extremely sparsely. The earliest of those was Mario Kart, about 1.5 years after the Wii U launched.
>The Wii U failed financially, but at least it had soul.
I never understand this argument. What even is “soul” and how does the Wii U have it compared to the Switch? It just feels like a buzzword that people throw around when they want to complain but can’t think of a good reason for it.
PlayStation backwards compat is way worse than nintendo lol. The switch 2 to switch 1 backwards compatibility is incredible and essentially flawless. But I agree that Xbox backwards compatibility is top of the line, and that’s why I choose Xbox over playstation 11/10 times
If the Wii U didn’t sell it’s because the Gamepad and Off-TV was not appealing and undesirable. It didn’t walk, it fell off a cliff and hit all the stones in the way down.
Virtual Console emulation on Wii U was hot garbage. Awful input delay, an unremovable black filter, missing visual effects from N64 (The same ones that appeared on NSO at launch but were fixed later on, those were never fixed on Wii U).
I doubt anyone saying Virtual Console on Wii U was amazing actually bothered to play the games on that console. I did, it sucked. I had to use the stick’s latency for wall jumping on Super Metroid, DK64 was almost unbearable, I had to press a button half a second before to make the action command count on Paper Mario.
Switch uses the emulation from the NES/SNES Classic mini and it’s **vastly** superior. It’s able to handle games with the SFX chip and mouse compatibility. Also N64’s emulation has improved a ton and we have Rare’s catalog, something that would be considered a dream in the Wii U days.
Also Switch 2’s backwards compatibility works via a translation layer, that improves the performance of Switch 1 games. Wii U’s BC worked by having Wii’s hardware on its inside and running games natively. If a game runs bad on Wii, it will still run bad on Wii U.
I can never understand the modern Wii U revisionism – people seem to forget just how bad it was in that era. 6 months into the Switch 2, we have a new MK, 3D DK, Kirby Air Ride sequel, Pokemon ARPG and Metroid Prime, with a new Fire Emblem, Tomodachi Life, Splatoon single player spinoff and Rhythm Heaven on the way. You know what the Wii U had by its first six months? New Super Mario Bros U. That’s it. And third parties weren’t like they are now, we got table scraps, and they started dropping like flies after its disappointing launch. And backwards compatibility was really just a virtual machine of the Wii that ran games at SD. not even HD which had been the standard for a while, and which the Wii U was meant to usher in. Now, Switch 2 editions come (mostly) with graphical upgrades and side content. I love the Wii U, I really do, but we have it SO much better now and people really need to realize it.
I think NSO is brilliant. Maybe not the drip-feed, but generally it’s a great service for the casual Switch owners. Most Switch owners aren’t going to buy retro games. Maybe some of the top bangers like Mario & Zelda, but not all the other rando ones. They’re generally paying for online so they can play Mario Kart, Splatoon, and Smash. Having access to 100s of retro games for “free” is an amazing bonus & opportunity for casuals to wade into the retro scene & play games they were never going to buy anyway. It’s a great value & keeps a lot of classic IP from being forgotten.
it wasn’t the console, it was the marketing and the timing.
I had it and the first year of games, before all the third parties abandoned it and just made cheap ports or just dance games, was great. It was different and playful with the mechanics.
It is in no way a blueprint for the switch. The whole concept of the WiiU was for it to be a central hub for a family living room. It was a way to get dual screen gaming on to a television. The switch is the antithesis of this philosophy.
The wiiu had social apps like Miiverse and a TV button on the controller. The Switch by comparison is as bare bones as a modern console gets, it’s literally just for games and the whole OS supports that.
I remember that one E3 Nintendo Direct during the WiiU era that ended with a video compilation of people celebrating Mario. I remember seeing that and just feeling so empty. That moment to me epitomizes that era of Nintendo. It was a period when Nintendo did everything they could to survive off goodwill alone cause they certainly didn’t have much else going on.
The Kit and Krysta podcast had a recent episode where they mentioned after one E3 in this era (probably 2014 or 2015) that night everyone met with Iwata over a video call and the look of disappointment on his face for the state of Nintendo was extremely palpable. I kinda wonder if that was the E3 I mentioned. Is that really the “soul” people want back?
The WiiU was actually a bad console and frankly a lot of the good PR at the time was in an attempt to save face which was mostly due to Iwata who’s death is really what marked the end of that. It doesn’t matter that the WiiU “pioneered” the hybrid concept (which it barely did, more on that later). It also doesn’t matter that Nintendo was more consumer friendly back then (though it did help make up for the fact that the WiiU was bad). Backwards compatibility with the Wii was nice, though hardly utilized as many Wii owners did not buy a WiiU.
The concept of the WiiU wasn’t even born from the whole hybrid thing. The success of the Wii was driven by casual gamers with fads like Wii Sports and other similar novelty games which died down quickly after the first year. Hardcore gamers didn’t take to motion controls however, largerly due to Nintendo’s own lack of proper usage of the input type, often tying it to things more suited to button presses rather than just aiming. Hardcore gamers also criticized the weak hardware in comparison to the Xbox 360 and PS3, as the rising popularity of photo realism since the inception of the PlayStation was reaching its peak. Nintendo wanted to maintain the tenuous hold they had on the Wii casual base, but also wanted to reach out to hardcore players again.
The result was basically caving into hardcore gamers with a standard dual analogue controller while leaving the Wii door open paving the way for backwards compatibility and future novelty games. However Nintendo felt that without substantial innovation their hardware would still struggle. This was the lesson they took from the GameCube and is what lead to the Wii. It wasn’t enough to make a good console with good games for them anymore. In the case of the Wii all the innovation was done with the Wiimote, but now they were reverting back to dual analogue.
And this is where the GamePad came in. It was Nintendo’s attempt to cater to both sides. It allowed for traditional controls while still differentiating themselves from the competition. Unfortunately the GamePad was extremely expensive and didn’t leave much room for the rest of the hardware. Multiple developers expressed concerns that the system couldn’t compete with the 360 or PS3, and then the One and PS4 launched making the WiiU look even more pathetic. On top of that, the GamePad itself hardly found much application.
Most games on the WiiU used the GamePad screen as a map or inventory display, which is something that isn’t really beneficial when you have to take your eyes off the actual game to check (more on that later). It’s better to just be able to pause to look at your inventory or have a mini map. Other games would use it in ways similar to Picture & Picture, like the little waiting mini game in Splatoon, which falls into the novelty category rather than innovation. You had random instances of touch controls shoehorned into games whicu is reminiscant of the Wiimote waggle in that they don’t need to exist but do for the sake of it. This includes being able to spawn platforms with the GamePad in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe or the tappable platforms in Super Mario 3D World. Pikmin 3 had a game update that introduced touch based controls but they weren’t as good as simply using a Wiimote and Nunchuck, which very often outshined the GamePad.
Eventually after a series of failed gimmicks Bayonetta 2 and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze didn’t even bother to use the GamePad for anything and the Breath of the Wild staff replaced the original touch inventory they made with the Dpad inventory they developed for the Switch, realizing it was faster and less of a distraction than swapping between two screens. This was the core issue of the GamePad. Splitting the player’s attention was not innovative, it was an active hindrance. ZombiU, a game most WiiU apologists touted as good use of the GamePad, leverages this distraction as a mechanic. But that’s literally proof that it’s the best the GamePad could ever amount to, a distraction, and one that actively bottlenecked the hardware.
A lot of the games I listed are indeed great games, and most of them did get ported to Switch. But this isn’t proof the WiiU was a good console, in fact this shows how unimportant the GamePad truly was given how easily everything it did was translated to the more intuitive and less disruptive gyroscope. The GamePad being less innovative did allow for third parties to more easily support the console compared to the Wii, but with how weak the WiiU was it couldn’t run new third party games and the old ones performed worse than previous gen hardware. Hardcore gamers thus scoffed at the console and because the GamePad was just so expensive and useless the casuals didn’t even understand what the point was.
This left people like me and you as Nintendo’s only customers, the fanboys. And this I think is why the WiiU is romanticized now, because fanboys will naturally always try to redeem the thing they are a fan of. Your last redemption I haven’t tackled is off-TV play, which didn’t really work well considering the GamePad needed to be in very close proximity to the console and the stretched GamePad screen capped at 480p made for a very blurry image. This hardly can be touted as pioneering the Switch concept. A better pioneer would be actual handhelds, like the GameBoy and DS lines, the former of which could be played on a TV via the GameCube GameBoy Player. The DS line is also likely where the idea for a second screen stemmed from, but it only worked there because both screens were always within your line of sight. And even then I’d argue most of the more touch based games were still little more than gimmicky novelties and wouldn’t hold up well today without a massive overhaul.
You also haven’t even brought up multiple other failed concepts, such as Nintendo TV which resulted from Nintendo noticing how much streaming was used on the Wii as well as Miiverse which was rendered obsolete by the rise of Twitter. The GamePad itself was also rendered obsolete by tablets which can do all of this better. So even beyond the stuff you mention there are even more ways the WiiU epically failed.
I’ll give you that it took far too long for Nintendo to start churning out a good original library for the Switch, but it eventually would happen and the sales reflect this and the much more appealing and well realized hyrbid concept than the second screen. Switch sold consistently well from start to finish, meanwhile the WiiU flopped and the Switch 2 has already outsold the lifetime sales of WiiU.
And before you start going off about how poor sales don’t mean the WiiU was bad, when I and others bring up said sales it isn’t to illustrate why the WiiU is bad. We’re using sales as evidence to the WiiU being bad and the Switch being good.
Call it narrow minded if you will, but in reality sales are most accurate reflection of quality for a game console, not the internet fanboy narrative. You can point out all the cute novelties tied to the WiiU you want, but in reality those novelties were gimmicks that didn’t innovate like the Wii or Switch and the console failed to adequately run the third party games it was made to. All you have left then is a few good first party games, most of which are on Switch now and better off for it.
Nope, it definitely was and is a bad console. I know because I’m one of the five people who actually own one lol.
>The GamePad literally pioneered the whole concept of “Off TV Play”
PS3/PSP had remote play years and years before the Wii U came out.
>and hybrid gaming
There’s nothing “hybrid” about it. It’s a stationary home console streaming the image to a non-independent handheld device that stops working as soon as you move more than like 8 meters away from the console.
>When the Wii U OS was sluggish at launch, they didn’t just ignore it, they released the 3.0.0 U update and actually filmed a side by side video to prove they fixed the load times
The console remained very sluggish even after all the updates. It takes ten seconds just to open up the goddamn settings. No, I’m not exaggerating.
>And the library was stacked
No it absolutely wasn’t lmao. You literally only named five games, and Pokken wasn’t even that great. Third-Party support was basically non-existent after the launch window; great First-Party games were few and far between; some high-profile Nintendo franchises like Metroid and Fire Emblem made no appearance at all; Zelda only showed up when the console was already dead and buried; and Nintendo also released an unusually high amount of trash like amiibo Festival, Mario Party 10, Wii Party U, Game&Wario etc
>most of the Switch’s early years were just porting Wii U games that people missed.
Another one of these dumbass online talking points that just refuses to die. Let’s get this out of the way first: BotW wasn’t a port, but a cross-platform release. Then you had Odyssey, Mario Rabbids, Splatoon 2, Xenoblade 2, Smash Ultimate, Super Mario Party, Link’s Awakening, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Astral Chain, the list goes on…. All great games that came out early in the Switch’s lifecycle and were not available on Wii U.
>The biggest downgrade with “modern” Nintendo, though, is backward compatibility. It’s actually trash compared to what other companies are doing.
The Switch wasn’t backwards-compatible with the Wii U for very obvious technical reasons. Now the Switch 2 is pretty much perfectly bc with the first Switch. I agree that BC on Xbox is great (although you make it sound like all 360 games work on modern Xbox consoles, which isn’t even close to being true) and that having to rent classic games with no option to purchase them is bad. However, neither renting or purchasing them actually constitutes backwards-compatibility, anyway, because there’s no way to use your old copies of the game on the new console. It would simply be you buying a new version of an old game.
As for the Pokemon stuff, that’s a whole other can of worms involving TPC and Game Freak, which I don’t really feel like getting into right now.
>at least it had soul
I’ll take a fast and functional UI as well as an actually great and vast library of games with lots of Third-Party support over whatever this unspecified “soul” is supposed to be.
It was barely a hybrid though. You couldn’t take the gamepad a few feet away from the console.
Why was the menu slow and laggy in the first place?
The switch 2 is compatible with every switch game and you get emulators for other consoles if you have NSO.
Nobody I have ever talked to irl mentioned they played the Battle frontier and I only met a few people online who did. Not even the competitive players talk about it.