Topic: What did you think of the Nintendo Direct in relation to the Wii U?

/It signified that Nintendo knows pii u is a bust and was smart to focus on the 3ds, as the 3ds will continue to sell well and make up for the failure that is pii u.
The smash trailer was amazing, and I guess Bayo and X looked decent, but are overhyped by fans, and this is coming from an earthbound fan.

that's nonsense. 3DS is going to sell well even without Nintendo Directs.
I don't get why fans think it's a smart move to focus on 3DS - granted, 3DS is making them money at the moment, but all this money is getting lost on WiiU. Nintendo loses money if WiiU just sits on shelves and looks pretty.

I was rather disappointed, and what disappoints me even more is that all it takes for fans to be satisfied is a new Smash Bros character and a couple of new trailers for games announced a year ago. Excuse me but this is the minimum we should expect. It's surprising that Nintendo is not in a good shape, yet they're not doing much to spice things up or generate interest.

There's some stuff to keep people interested between now and E3, but E3 is not a release window, it's just a platform for announcements. And at this pace, even if they name all the games people want to hear like Zelda or Metroid (which again, is not a miracle, it's just the minimum people expect from Nintendo), when are these games going to be released?

If you expected new Wii U game announcements in a ND that clearly said it was focusing in Spring games, you are going to have a bad time.

Let's get real, I bet new game Wii U games production is barely starting after Nintendo hired a bunch of people a couple of months ago. There's absolutely no way they gonna have a new Wii U game announced for Spring.

For what its worth, here are the view counts of the new Nintendo trailers from IGN's Youtube page. They have all been up for around 15 hours, and provide a bit of an indication about how interested people are in these games...

DK:TF = 5,100
MK8 = 12,300
SSB = 30,500
Yoshi = 4000
Mario Golf = 4000
Kirby = 7000

By far SSB is the most popular game, MK8 is surprisingly low, and the rest are quite disappointing.

As said before, we really shouldn't expect anything huge before E3 by this point in time. Look what happened last year: Nintendo basically let everyone know in advance what was going to be shown, and it turns out those were the only big surprises so there technically wasn't much we didn't see coming, which of course, lent itself to disappointment.

I wouldn't really use these to indicate anything...

Considering they already have a few unreleased games, what would they gain from announcing even more?

Why not? If a lot of people are watching it, it shows theres interest. If they aren't watching, it shows there is less. Basically a survey. Hence why videos have "view counts".

I was fine with the Direct. They gave Little Mac which was a pleasant surprise and caught a lot of people off guard, considering most were expecting a new DK character. They gave us trailers for games we've been needing for a while. Nothing new, which yes, is a bit disappointing, but not exactly unexpected. I've seen much worse directs. All the people complaining are overreacting. My bet is that maybe JUST MAYBE, we get one new game announcement before E3. That's it. Nintendo will hold a conference at E3 this year and they are coming with a very big, heavily loaded gun. They have too. Otherwise I don't see why they wouldn't have at least one trailer of a game like FE X SMT or whatever else they have up their sleeve.

Building excitment and interest in their console? Providing evidence that the console has a viable future and that games are in the works?

Well for one, because Nintendo has their trailers on their own youtube page.

@JohnRedcorn
To be fair IGN's numbers for those trailers are well under the official Nintendo Channel's numbers (looking now about 1/10th to 1/5th of the official channel's numbers). Plus the fact that on IGN's youtube channel the most viewed content from the few hours before the ND had around 10-20k views. So the IGN audience is about as interested in Mario Kart 8 as they are in The Last of Us DLC and the Titanfall beta. Nothing bad about that.

Because you're taking a small sample anyway, as kkslider noted.

And? So that makes these numbers meaningless?

Just checking Nintendo's view counts, and although the numbers are larger, they still fall in line with the patterns of the IGN views. There is no SSB trailer on Nintendo's page, but MK8 is the top, Bayonette 2nd, with DKC:TF (not a system seller) WAY below those titles, then Kirby above Mario Golf as well. Two "surveys" with identical results seem to show a pattern of fan interest, no?

And I think if we were to post what we each thought were the most popular titles upcoming on the Wii-U, we would list them....

1. SSB
2. MK8
3. Bayonetta 2
4. DKC:TF

Which again, matches up with the results gleaned from the view counts.

Well, you should add the numbers from several main channels. For example, I tend to watch the trailers posted from GameXplain, while other may only watch from IGN, or Nintendo, and so forth. To only count just one channel is silly.

yeah what would they gain? WiiU is selling like hot cakes anyway, they don't need to prove people that new exciting experiences are coming and the system might even get more than 5 retail games per year (WOW FIVE!!)! They just need to keep us posted about what's been around since 2012!

If game announcements sold the console, it would have done way better the moment they showed Smash Bros. I'd assume they're saving some surprises for E3, because the biggest problem last year is that they failed to save surprises for E3 and got buried for it.

Its not so much the actual number of views, but the pattern.

Across the Nintendo and IGN pages, the order of "top viewed" videos involving the new trailers is virtually identical.

Smash Bros, MK8, Bayonetta, DKC, Kirby, Mario Golf.

Would you argue that that is not the correct order of upcoming games ranked according to fan interest? Looks about right to me. And the views on IGN and Nintendo support this 100%.

I personally really liked this Nintendo Direct.

Doesn't say much anyone didn't already know but either way it isn't necessarily something to read into. It could be that people aren't watching the DK trailer because this close to launch they already know enough. People click on videos when they're expecting to see something new. We've come to expect new stuffs from Mario Kart and Smash trailers so that'll boost the numbers for them.

If you're expecting it to translate into sales or something I wouldn't put my money on it. Sure it'll probably be in the ballpark but the most popular video over the last few months on Nintendo's Channel is the one for Hyrule Warriors at about 2x the number of views as an equivalently old Mario Kart trailer. I would be pretty shocked if Hyrule Warriors ended up selling twice as many copies as Mario Kart 8.