Topic: Is Nintendo Too Big To Fail?

@EaglyBird
Yeah, nah. The Wii U's issue was never its name. The problem with the Wii U was that Nintendo's vision didn't align with the direction the market happened to be in when it launched

I mean, if I could describe Nintendo in one word it would be insular so this definitely happens from time to time. They're not a spontaneous or random company like some would try to argue but they are, for better or worse, blissfully unaware of market expectations. The Wii U wasn't the first time where Nintendo being like that blew up in their face and it won't be the last

As I said in the post that @Bolt_Strike partially quoted, the Wii U failed because Nintendo was unaware of what the market wanted. People wanted cheap, no frills, HD graphics. People wanted a responsive OS and they wanted online connectivity. The Wii U was more expensive than the 360, had a sluggish OS, clunky online infrastructure and a controller gimmick that in the eyes of consumers was unnecessary

I think what happened with Wii U is that Nintendo made a follow up to the Wii after the Wii's relevance had plummeted and then didn't focus on anything that made it look like a must-own, new experience like the Wii was, nor as an HD Wii because it was focused on some unrelated tablet thing and despite being a successor to the casual Wii console then launched with largely hardcore games except the big launch title being a love letter to various Nintendo series trying to use Nintendo to sell to the casual to borderline non-gamer audience like Wii Sports but using their brand name and IP rather than sports but also weren't proper, traditional versions of those Nintendo games for hardcore Nintendo fans.

takes a breath

...y'know something like that. Also terrible marketing that appealed to basically no one. Shame because Wii U could have and in some ways should have been both a cool console version of a DS and also an innovative multiplayer machine, but half the time even Nintendo didn't want to make games to do much with the possibility of those ideas.

Part of me wants to blame it on the fact that Wii ended up as a fad because it was a machine designed for an audience not deep enough into gaming to care about even being enough into games to buy a follow up console in the first place (which is why the Switch has had much healthier success for the company since it relied on games for people who already like games), but I do think Nintendo thoroughly botched the Wii U too, considering how they somehow followed up the Wii and then sold worse than the Gamecube (which itself took 10+ years of decline in console sales to get to that point, unlike the 4 years Nintendo went from best console sales ever to the Wii U launch)