Topic: An alternate reality where the Wii U didn't fail harder than the N64...

@DM7Dust
It sold insanely well on the Wii U, around 60% of people who had a Wii U had Mario Kart 8. But the Wii U sold poorly so those numbers would only put it at like #15 on the Switch best sellers list. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold ~5X more copies than the original did on Wii U

What I was saying was that if the Wii U had been a hit Mario Kart 8 probably moves ~40mill units on Wii U. With that many units sold? It would've been harder to justify releasing the game on Switch exactly as it was on Wii U. In that alternate reality we don't get a Mario Kart in year 1 of the Switch, we probably don't get the Switch until a year or two later. And when we do get Mario Kart? It's probably called Mario Kart 9 with a bunch of entirely new tracks. Basically alternate reality Switch gets this booster pack as Mario Kart 9

I mean it makes sense. If the predecessor has a huge install base it's much harder to lean on ports. Just look at the Wii and Switch libraries compared to the Wii U. The Wii had a fair number of late Gamecube projects and a fair number of ports under the "New Play Control" banner. The Wii U gets pretty much no ports, a couple of HD remaster Zeldas to give the Zelda fans something but not much. Then Switch comes out and pretty much every major Wii U game gets ported to it. Because nobody brought them on Wii U

@Savage_Joe
Late reply to your post I know but just reading this now after the thread being revived. I don't think an AMD partnership would've made sense and I wouldn't call Tegra "not so great". Sure there are better SoCs now but the most power efficient ones are still ARM based. AMD has only just super recently become power efficient enough for something like the Steam Deck to be viable. And by just recently I mean literally the Steam Deck is the first commercial product to have that degree of efficiency

Also I would argue that the portable nature of the Switch was an obvious move for Nintendo. Even without the Wii U's failure I think it's pretty clear Nintendo would've tried to merge portable and home consoles. The Wii U was, as I see it, them trying to rush into the concept before it was possible. Nintendo likes to experiment but they experiment with well established technology. In the mobile space that's ARM and Tegra is the most GPU heavy ARM SoC.

I don't think the Wii U being successful would've been enough for Nintendo to wait for AMD's x86 mobile APUs to be well established players in the mobile gaming space. There is no universe, even one where the Wii U moves 100mill units, where the Wii U holds out until 2024

@skywake ARM will always be power efficient (unless a more efficient architecture comes in). My comment stated that Nintendo decided to rush the Switch with an outdated Tegra chip when nVidia was pretty much announcing an even better pascal tegra chip months before, at probably the same price as the maxwell one.

The Switch could have true 1TF on its GPU instead of 390GF, since Pascal was around double the performance for the same watt rating. That would've meant better looking games from the get go, and there would be no need of "miracle ports" of AAA games like what's happening now.

Or then, if the Wii U was massively successful, Nintendo would've opted for the AMD mobile chip and released the Switch last year with that. The Game Boy's lifespan was 12 years until the GBA launched. So, they could've done the same with the Wii U had it been selling well.

@Savage_Joe
Again, there's no reality in which the Wii U holds out for 12 years. Not even one where the Wii U is the king of consoles during its time. I mean the writing for it was kinda on the wall from the start in terms of the architecture they picked. It made sense at the time to go PPC because the 360, PS3 and Wii were all PPC based but outside of that PPC was a bit of a dead end. And ontop of that as a console the Wii U was way too power hungry to make a portable version of but also seriously underpowered for a home console. Something would've had to give eventually

Sure, maybe in that alternate reality Nintendo holds out on the Wii U a tad longer. But eventually they release new hardware to replace the 3DS. Pretty much any new portable hardware they release after around 2016 makes the Wii U look redundant. Certainly any hardware by around 2018/19. As you said, if Nintendo waits another year the Tegra SoC they develop with Nvidia is probably a tad faster. That fact makes it LESS likely the Wii U sticks around not more

So yeah. Alternate timeline where the Wii U is a hit? Overall probably not that much different to where we ended up. Especially in terms of hardware

That sounds fair. I guess it's pretty hard to really tell what Mario Kart on Switch would have looked like if the Wii U did a lot better.