Topic: Why does the Wii U get so much hate?

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I want to make sure before I start that everyone that takes the time to read my comment has to realize I'm not trying to bash or insult anyone, but if there is BS in a thread, I certainly WILL address it. But it isn't personal, just so you know.

FRIENDLY WARNING: It is also going to be quite a long comment so if you dare to jump in with me, take a deep breath because here we go:

After having read all pages of comments I could easily say how many of you are wrong, DEAD wrong, and I have the facts to support that. But it isn't as black and white as that. First of, most comments are (obviously) based on opinions and those can't be debated since it is your own opinion and you are allowed to have one and should have one as far as I'm concerned. Secondly, I need to consider what the OP actually meant: the hate from gamers, the hate from the industry or the hate in general?

Those all require different answers. And based off of that some responses are wrong by definition and some other answers are wrong because they don't answer the question but instead start to give reasons/examples that have more to do with why the Wii U is doing so bad or why THEY don't like it, and that in and of itself has NOTHING to do with the Wii U getting all the hate. Yes, Nintendo fakked up the marketing and maybe should have distanced their new platform from the family-loving Wii by giving it another name, but that is NOT the point here. If there is any individual anywhere out there that takes offense to these actions from Nintendo to such an extent that they feel Nintendo deserves their hate, then I all I can do is laugh in this person's face because he/she is truly a pathetic excuse for a human being.

I personally feel that the question is about the industry, so I will try to answer it from that perspective. If that is incorrect then I'll gladly hear @GamingSince64 opinion on that and will add another comment to give my 2 cents from the correct perspective.

As for Nintendo's position in the industry, here's a bunch of historical facts and technical insights, combined with the likely reasons for the hate. Hope it helps:

The strict business rules that Nintendo applies go way back, and did NOT start with the SNES, but already in the 8 bit era, with the NES. Nintendo has laid down the foundations of their policy and rules that are somewhat milder nowadays, but still more strict and traditional than the other two companies. A lot of that has to do with their Asian background, that already has some pretty strict rules and some definite values embedded in the culture so it is no more than natural that you take and incorporate these values into your place of work.
For Western society this is sometimes very hard to understand. I know for example the utter astonishment of quite a lot of people in the West when back in the early eighties they learned that employees of Toyota car manufacturing not only worked in the plant, but also lived there, sometimes with their entire family. Such a thing is to this day still not seen as the standard thing to do in Western society. And that is only one example.

Then there is the age difference: Nintendo has been with us two generations more than Sony and three generations more than Microsoft, so when these two jumped in, the times were a' changing and they could adjust to that far easier because they didn't have that older foundation upon which all of their business strategies and development plans were based. Just take a look at other older companies for comparison: they too have more trouble to adapt/change than new companies that rise up in today's world because they have to change MORE than companies that start later in a more modern age because they already have a foundation upon which they are based.

Also, what a lot of us Western people see as being arrogant or even dumb is tied to these values and the pride that Asian people have in their efforts and work. (and life) And let me add "justified" to the pride, otherwise we Western people will change pride into something negative, because truly, in general we do like to have something to complain about, don't we?

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As a quick side note, before anyone tries to one-up me on that: NO, Sony is NOT the same sort of "Asian values and traditions" company as Nintendo. One only has to take a look at their worldwide operations and departments to see that they are way, WAY more Westernized than Nintendo, so the same does not apply to them. They are, for all intent and purposes, the same sort of company as Microsoft, at least as far as their console business is concerned.
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Now because of their Asian ideas and traditions/values, they are very much the company that they are today and up until recently it is what has made them strong. Consider this: how soon would you change your own methods if they have worked for you for almost 30 years just because you hit a big bump in the road? You probably won't or, if you do and results don't appear soon enough, you will go back to what worked for you. This is a fact in 90% of all cases and the reasons are apparent.

In Nintendo's case, change happened with the GameCube: they made a powerful system, that was better than PS2 overall and even outgunned the original Xbox in some areas (transparencies and lighting to name but a few). Of course they did have to make some proprietary changes, because Nintendo will always do that, so they came up with these funny little DVD's. Other than that it was a console on par with the competition. It didn't work for them to just go along the same path as the other two, so they reverted to their old ways and did not go along with all the HD hype and gave us the Wii. It was a big gamble but luckily for them it worked out just fine. They have an inherent need to always be different, to be innovative or create different ways of playing, instead of just copy pasting the same machine with more power and better graphics. People thinking that they could win or be equal by doing the exact same thing as the other two are delusional, because history has already proven them wrong.

Now allow me to take a few steps back so I can explain some aspects of the relationship between third parties and Nintendo:

In the 8 and 16 bit era, Nintendo, under Yamauchi's reign, had literally blindsided the competition and more or less tricked third parties into making games exclusively for them by drawing up very constrictive contracts that were basically near impossible to get out of without suffering some nasty consequences. I could go into more detail, but that is what it boiled down to and it keeps things a bit easier to understand.
Then there was of course the Nintendo Seal of Quality, something that has certainly degraded since the SNES days, considering all the shovelware we've seen on Nintendo consoles since the N64, but back in the day, it really meant something.
They did uphold these rules for the Wii's eShop initially, which is what rubbed a lot of smaller developers the wrong way and has made it necessary for Nintendo to court these indies once again when the Wii U was released.

Finally, because of Nintendo's background/methods they would and probably never will do what the industry wants, because they feel that outsiders should NOT dictate what hardware they make as a company since it is THEIR core business. And to a certain point I wholeheartedly agree with them.
It would be the same for any other company: car companies do NOT make the cars that we ask them to, THEY decide and if it doesn't sell, the model gets discontinued. (the only obvious exception being companies like Ferrari and such that customize vehicles as long as the customer is willing to pay) The same goes for almost every other commodity whether it's food, appliances, services or real estate so why should it be different for console builders?

And of course, Nintendo is the only true console giant left, because even though the other two also build their own consoles, it is not their CORE business, so they could always fall back on their other divisions if for some reason or other they would have to retreat from the console business. Nintendo does not have that luxury (not going into the Quality of Life debate since that is far from being conclusive as we speak) but it also brings with it the good thing that because they only have to focus on one business type, they can give it more attention. That does not mean that they will never make mistakes, if you believe that then you might just as well believe in fairy tales, because it's just not how the business world works. However, for the most part it is the very reason for their past successes.

So they will always plot their own course and not with the idea of "my way or the highway" as so many people seem to think, but coming from the whole cultural and traditional way of things that has been their foundation for so long and their true belief that innovation is key, constantly striving to bring something new instead of just going for raw power and concurrent upgrades of existing templates.

I would also hope that Western people would gain some more insight into companies like this, ESPECIALLY if they feel the need to criticize them, since it CANNOT be done with the short-sightedness of a Western-only point of view. There needs to be some middle ground to gain understanding and from there on out things could become more clear to all of us. Might also make some of us more sympathetic to the (way too) often ridiculed "please understand"... (if you would openly express such sentiments in their country or presence, it would be seen as highly disrespectful, and rightfully so)

Developers on the other hand have largely gotten lazy (I don't want to judge them all, since there are still quite a few good ones left as well) and because of them being driven by their employers who are only driven by money and don't give a damn about the public or games, they demand a cozy hardware environment that has more than enough space and power for them to dump their program in, straight from the workstations they developed it on without a lot of optimization or adjustments. But I largely blame the employers for this, not the programmers themselves, because we can be sure that they possess the skills to do what would be necessary, they just don't get the time and money to do it.
This simply cannot be done when you have to deal with x86 environments on one side and PowerPC based environments on the other side.
For the more tech savvy amongst you: it's RISC vs CISC instruction sets and they are not mutually interchangeable, but both have their pro's and cons.
The first is based on raw power, but is far from efficient as far as energy and compatibility are concerned (larger instruction set, more options, not always good). Only recently, since the introduction of AMD Jaguar have x86 structures started to become less power hungry. The second is based on optimizing performance and effectivity so it has a higher performance vs power consumption ratio (i.e. needing less power to do the same things). One of the main reasons why Power/RISC architectures are still used in certain servers today. But where consoles are concerned, optimization and maximizing effectiveness take time (= money) so with the current standings as far as possible return on investments & profits are concerned, the choice is obvious.

And one thing to get out of the way once and for all: The Wii U is NOT difficult to develop for. ALL previous consoles were Power/RISC based to some extent, including the PS3, so if they could make games on those, then they can easily make games on Wii U.

Therefore, the correct thing to say is that the x86 architectures of the Xbox One/PS4 require very little optimization/changes, so it's quicker and easIER to develop for. That does NOT make the Wii U hard to develop for, just less easy because it needs more time for optimization and such, but any self respecting developer that already has a lot of experience with all the previous consoles shouldn't even break into a sweat making something for Wii U, provided he/she would get the time to make the most of it from the publisher they're working for. Full fledged titles are a definite possibility, and publishers should know full well that we do not need the half-baked, full-priced but gimped ports we've seen so often of late.

The final verdict is that if all consoles had started off equally, then the difference would only be noted in the later generations of games and in the exclusive titles, because if the Wii U had sold equally well as the competing consoles then all or most of the third parties would all of a sudden fall over each other in their rush to develop for Wii U because money could then be made and certainly, multi-platform titles would show little to no difference when a bit more time, care and money would have been put into it. It is also interesting to note that all three parties have chosen to go with a General Purpose GPU structure, so Nintendo must have been on to something with that...

Hardware wise, x86 will always win in the end, because it's the dominant architecture and you can throw just about anything at it as long as you provide it with enough RAM and graphics CPU, whereas the standard PowerPC chip has a somewhat limited instruction set. But remember, the one in the Wii U is heavily modified...
I believe that Nintendo chose to once again go with this architecture because they wanted to have a console with a small energy footprint that could still provide them with enough power to make the software that they wanted to bring. But they alone have the luxury of taking the time to use this environment to the fullest, which is what third parties can't do currently, mainly because of the huge imbalance in investment vs revenue with the current market share of the Wii U. They did achieve it though, because the Wii U is way more energy efficient than the Wii while still being able to do so much more. Go figure...

Nintendo has also already proven multiple times that great looking games can be created with this hardware so the whole power debate is too ridiculous for words. Yes, the other two are more powerful, and in the second and third generation of games this is going to become more apparent, but the difference is NOWHERE near that of the last generation (obviously, since that was SD vs HD).

Also, the other two need to multitask so if you take that into account, the difference in memory available for games is also quite a bit smaller than most of you will think. The Wii U has 2GB: 1GB for the OS and 1GB for games, the other two have 8GB, but because of them doing all these different things with it, like playing Blurays, live game video streaming/recording, OS, and so on almost two thirds of that is reserved, leaving only 2,6GB on average for games. To some extent the same also goes for the CPU, since that also has to handle more in the other two consoles, so it being "way" more powerful doesn't mean all that much in the larger picture. Mainly because the architectures are so different you can't just do a one on one comparison of the CPU/GPU/RAM. It just doesn't work that way. And don't get me started on all the "don't know what to do with or how to implement the GamePad" BS...

But I'm drifting off course because this was about why there's hate, not about how powerful the Wii U actually is or not...

In conclusion, with all that in mind, here are some possible reasons why the industry or third party developers (or rather publishers) would "hate" the Wii U or Nintendo: (I say "hate" because it is for the largest part simply a business decision based on money instead of an emotional one)

• Nintendo makes the hardware that it wants, not giving third parties their way in giving them a platform to make easy money on.
• The bigger companies still remember the stranglehold Nintendo had on them in the old days and may still feel some resentment
• Because of Nintendo's marketing failure, the Wii U platform is too small to make a decent profit on, making development too costly
• Self-fulfilling prophecy behavior by delivering inferior versions of their own software for full price to "prove" it doesn't sell on Wii U

It is NOT about power, the GamePad, region locking, different chip sets and it's DEFINITELY not about Iwata, that one is too ridiculous to even consider being worth mentioning. Simply put: if the Wii U's market share was large enough, then most of these games WOULD be coming to Wii U, there's no doubt about that, not even a millisecond. Why else did the Wii get so many of these games, practically the whole COD series included, even though the graphic fidelity was WAY lower? Because of money, THAT'S why...
(and Nintendo's marketing is largely at fault for that this time around)

Well, those were my 2(000) cents. Thanks for reading it all if you did.

P.S.

I'd like to compliment a couple of people on their comments because they were intelligent and for the larger part well thought out:

@JaxonH - some thoughtful comments, and a nice read as almost always
@Ootfan98 - Your first couple of comments: nail on the head my friend. Nail on the head...
@Nintenjoe64 - constructive and positive comments but without the rosy colored fanboy BS. Cheers...
@sub12 - Even though we don't agree on all points (opinions and such, what can you do?) your comments come across as well thought out
@Ralek85 - same goes for you
@SCAR392 - To the point, as always
@kkslider5552000 - you brought up some nice reality checks...