Sceptic

I just can't imagine that the company that so royally messed up their flagship console in the crudest way can now suddenly go all Steve Jobs. Especially that talk about "focusing on the Gamepad" sounds like the same hot air we were served a year ago about "it's all about content, stupid" (which turned out to be true but not in the way they thought). Their track record shows they barely have any ideas at all for the WiiU gamepad, what changed?

Also, with their licensing adjustment they may suddenly have to wake up to the idea that people are just not that into their IP anymore. While everybody and their grandma plays and thus knows angry birds, the Luigi-savvy are a dying breed.

But we'll see.

@scrubbyscum999: I sure hope you're right. But I have yet to read of anybody - I mean anybody - even remotely making sense of what he portrayed as 'The Great Nintendo Rebound Plan'.

It sounds like another utter misinterpretation of the past WiiFit success and a lot of delusion. But hey, we'll see. I'd like to see some actual concepts and plans though, not more "please, unterstand."

Hiroshi Yamauchi would tell you to fall on your sword.

He certainly has been carrying a lot of air this past year. Not sure it's one of confidence though.

I mean, they can't even manage a unified account system and now they're building their strategy on something they don't even have up and running yet?

"Leapfrog strategy" is just a buzzword. There is no "non wearable" blue ocean beyond "wearable". If there is (or was), then we already have had it for at least a decade. And it came before mobiles and wearables. Remember when fitness sites were just that? Before Endomodo and MyFitnessCoach and what not. Non wearable!

They are just trying to glaze over is the fact that they have nothing to offer the current big and evolving trends which are mobile and wearable hard and software, so they're acting like that's some brilliant business move.

"Non wearable" sounds exactly like the encumbrance that it is.

The man is insane. Somebody needs to stop him.

@Ren: Right on.

I want what they're smoking. This would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.

Now they're doomed. Oh gosh.

@letsplay: If you have any positive news, let's have it. Did you buy six million WiiU consoles yesterday? That would be awesome.

In any case, this is not a negative piece. It's discussing perspectives in bleak times.

Yeah, roughing it by reducing your salary for a measly five months is a real gesture when you've pulverized two billion in market value and jeopordized your company's future. Top lad, this Iwata.

A gesture would have been to reduce his salary until he can show he's turned things around. A gesture would have been to just step down. This so called gesture is just a Machiavellian propaganda trick, and not even a clever one at that.

All you really need to know about the future of the gamepad is in DK:TF.

Seriously. A first party flagship title - that has local multiplayer at that - that makes no use of it at all. It's just black. Total resignation. What more is there to say?

Ironically this discount is why I'm definitely going to pass on the European version until the price is at least roughly in the same ball park. If capcom values it at $20 on a discount why are they asking us for more than twice that on our 'discount' (250%!)? Because we're suckers I guess.

It helps of course that I'd only be buying to figure out what the hype is about. I hated the demo, but everybody keeps saying there's more. I'll pay anything under $30 to find out, but not $50.

I'd like to say 'keep it' but I can't name one single game except nintendoland that really uses it. Most games actually play worse with the gamepad than any other controller (MH3, Planes, Trine2, The Cave and any shooter).

It's a great 'deluxe' feature but should not be marketed as part of the core system. It has failed, as a feature, seeing as even Nintendo doesn't know how to use it in a ming-blowing way.

Anything that says Q3 you can move to "awesome games coming in 2015". Then randomly cancel two or three others and you have your real list.

You know you're benig ripped off when your half price is still $10 more than some other region's full price (MH3U). Such a shame.

@WaveBoy: probably depends on the response time of the TV in question. I have no such issues anywhere.

But yeah, the necessary tradeoff seems to be either 30fps or 720p.

@unrandomsam: Never had a problem with 30fps if it's stable at that rate.

But upscaling a game from 720p you're marketing as 'full HD' just sounds like more corner cutting. Like they ran into the performance wall kind of early there.

An upscaled DVD isn't Bluray.

$75 is the retail price where I live. Yes, I agree. It's ridiculous.

Graphics look only slightly better than on my three year old Android tablet.

Maybe because it's only 720p natively.

On the up side, it makes Rayman, Giana Sisters and Trine 2 look like they're next gen or something.

The graphics look absolutely hideous. For a $75 game they must be joking.

@ZyroXZ2: Safe to say that the hardcore Nintendo fans are a negligible demographic. And rightfully so, as certain comments here are testament to.

Woah, this is bad.

People should be allowed to do what they want with the hardware they purchased. There were it is being used to pirate copyrighted material, it should be stopped, but only there.

Other than that, Nintendo should invest more money in developing games, instead of legal fees fighting of perceived threats to their IPs.

Well, I hope not, the news alone would completely kill the WiiU.

@Falco: Absolutely. Greed and Arrogance killed the WiiU. They thought they could milk the Wii-suckers with another round of the same low cost/high margin cookie-cutter games, but people saw through it. For that, they deserve what they're getting.

Even 'epic' titles like Wind Waker got absolutely minimal effort from nintendo. They even admitted it only took them six months to port (but a year to release?), and that's including the 'delay' because they "underestimated" the work required to port it to HD (think about that!). In other words, they thought they could pull it off for even less than that.

The ever-delayed Donkey Kong game is going to be the next one to bomb. I look at the trailer and I keep having to remind myself it's supposed to be a full blown $70 game on a living room console, not a $4 tablet time-waster. It's like watching an elderly street artist draw unicorns.

WiiU wasn't a bold decision. It was incredibly vain and arrogant. And then they tried to puff it up with lies and hot air ("soon", "just wait", "patience", blabla), a scheme the market obviously saw through a lot better than I did back then.

How are the same clowns that so stubbornly refused to see the emperor had no clothes right up until the very end going to improve the situation?

I'm totally with @Caryslan. They are way out of their depth here and the game is over. It's too late.

What they can still try to compete with is the nVidia Shield and the likes. Let the WiiU die quietly five years from now and bring out the controller as a mobile device.

Ah, Nintendo being a jerk again. On a karma level they really do deserve what they're getting. Someday they'll sue twitter for retweeting something.

@kereke12: It's a crimimnal offense to knowingly mislead your shareholders and the stock market like that. They had no choice now but to make the correction they ethically - and quite probably legally - should already have made last September.

They would argue they were hoping for a Christmas Miracle but frankly they didn't have much factual basis for that hope.

That is probably also why they made the WiiU price cut effective when it was (instead of immediately), so that they could further claim the Q2 numbers were 'improving' at the end of September (remember the "300% increase" claim?) and thus the projections didn't warrant adjusting. The whole thing reeks. Very questionable business ethics at best.

@Tritonus: What I mean is I won't be buying a 'WiiU Sequel Console' from Nintendo until they prove they are able and willing to make it a winner (which is doubly hard now that they utterly failed the few people that trusted them on this one).

I have zero trust in Nintendo at this point. They just don't get it, and not only that, they sweet-talk, lie and deny until the very last possible moment, as this sales episode made painfully clear. Remember all that talk about "super secret fantastic stuff"? All that "you wil be amazed, just wait"? All that "we have great things we unfortunately can't talk about yet"? All that 'magical fantastic content' obviously simply doesn't exist.

Of course there are some good games for WiiU, but they're not worth owning a WiiU for.

Ah, it's all in the wording isn't it? Nintendo is not doomed, because even if they layed off everybody tomorrow they could make a proft with their IP.

As for the WiiU, it's not doomed either. It's obviously pretty much dead. Maybe Nintendo will dream up some new concept for the next round, but this gamer for one will be steering well clear of anything Nintendo after this debacle.

He doesn't need to step down, someone needs to put the cuffs on this guy. Even the doomsday analysts put them at almost twice that. They've been deliberately misleading the market while hoping for a miracle.

Also, Sushi outsold turkey this Xmas in Japan. Yay Sushi World Domination by April 2014. Them turkeys don't stand a chance.

Minecraft has taken over just about all gaming time for my kids for the last nine months or so. Pikmin 3, for one, still sits at level one while they both hack and stack away at their castles and villages, and no indication of that changing.

I really can't think of a more 'family compatible' game than Minecraft.

@Webby-sama: Yeah, it really is ridiculous to expect Nintendo to act like a present day customer-focused company.

You sell a product with certain functionality. When your product fails to work as advertized, you lose consumer confidence. A rationally acting company tries to restore consumer confidence in their brand by doing something positive to make them forget the negative experience that is now directly associated witht heir brand.

You see, it's so that next time when their customers talk about their WiiU to a friend, it will be a more positive story than how the eShop was out for three days.

Does that vaguely make sense?

Come on, we're not even talking about some innocent "sorry, our servers are currently unavailable". We're talking actual system crashes and serious sounding stuff like "Error Core: 112-1154. Your system will now shut down. If the problem persists, please contact your service representative". That is more than just a few servers that are unavailable.

Whichever way you look at it, this is an epic fail for Nintendo. And yeah, IIRC this happened last year too and for several lengthy periods during the year (but thanks to the random error messages I had no idea where the problem was).

But who's surprised. Nintendo have turned denial into a business plan. I'm sure the first report from the server farm admins was "no, our servers are just fine, thank you very much."

@PinkSpider: It's called consumer confidence.

In other news, no WiiU games in the UK Xmas top 40 at all. Best 3ds game at #26 (AC:New Leaf), Wii's Let's dance makes it to #4 though.

But you can't extrapolate from single markets. If the delta between Japan and UK charts is any indication it'll be a train wreck overall, but who knows?

@PinkSpider: Yeah, that'll be the day.

What I really don't get is why you get odd error codes when you can't connect.

Shame about the WiiU Sports promo too. Ah, Nintendo.

@Lavita: Woah there. "Over-the-top-cartoonish, yet boring, generic, and most of the time flat out UGLY artstyles" kind of describes Nintendo - by today's standards. We tolerate, even love it, because it builds on a history of characters we learned to love, but if someone came out with Mario today, out of nowhere, it wouldn't even register with people.

To me, Nintendo is a bit like an Eric Clapton of the gaming world. You can't really diss him, because he used to be great and somehow, although he clearly isn't that great anymore, you can still hear a bit of his greatness when he plays and you forgive what would be considered 'generic' by today's standards because he kind of defined that genre, way back when. And man, do you still love to hear him play 'Layla'. So he's still great and nobody will ever be like him, because those good old 'Superstar' times are past. Video killed the radio star.

Seriously, how about an error message that actually tells you what's the matter. After two hours of trying to connect and getting multiple seemingly random obscure error messages (some with error number, sometimes just the old "there has been an error") and even two system crashes (white screen of death!?) from the eShop, I come here to find out it's just server congestion?

I'm no user experience expert, but how about an error message that at least vaguely alludes to problems connecting to nintendo servers? I'd have been much more relaxed about it instead of rebooting the WiiU a dozen times, rebooting the router and what not. Really lame.

"shortlisting WiiU games". Now there's some involuntary humor.

Super Mario 3D World, huh? Touch choice.

Minecraft could single handedly pull the WiiU from the sinkhole it's in.

If you can say the WiiU and gamepad caters to one particular type of gaming experience, it would be Minecraft. I really, really hope this is true.

@Yorumi: Feel free to do so, but there's no need to wait a year. End of march 2014 - Nine Million units.

That epic failure will be the industry running gag long after anybody remembers what the WiiU looked like.

The great news for you is I get to eat my words regardless. As a WiiU owner, I'd rather be wrong here.

Pretty hopeless. The WiiU needs a management team to look after it, not that clown troop at Nintendo. I'm amazed Nintendo of America hasn't flat out revolted. There must be somebody with an MBA in that company. Where the heck is he (or she)?

Like I already said elsewhere, the sad truth is they'll probably be lucky to even reach 5 Million units sold.

StreetPass is my nightmare social network, for me, but especially for my kids. Creepy as hell. 'Ollie from England' may well be there every day to watch the kids walking home from school shout with glee as they get a hit off him.

Like telling your kids to "go out and gather candy from strangers". Too few characters to be concerning? I wish I shared your ignorance.

Rush! Ooh yeah. One of the best ever. Simple but deep. Great stuff.

@nintendork666: Well, yes, it's by platform (Xbox, PS, Nintendo). But the state of affairs being what it is for Nintendo, it must have been real a tough choice. Other nominees were Pikmin 3, Rayman and W101. And it's not like they'd award it to a game that already bombed.

2012 that overpriced Mario rehash won against a bunch of games that dared show some depth. Go figure.

But see the pattern?

Of course it's not the answer. It would destroy any reason left to buy their hardware.

But there will inevitably come a day when it will be the only choice.

100 Billion Yen that should read, not $.

I honestly think 6 Million units estimate is still way too high, but we'll see.

There's a difference between "useless" and "no real value". It's far from useless, but I agree it hardly ads real value, with some very rare exceptions.

Note that he's not talking of Off-TV play.

My 8yo kid played two hours of this last Sunday. I had to drag him away from it. He absolutely loves it, which is a lot more than I can say of Pikmin.

This is a very unfair review. This game is great fun and certainly well worth the money.

Plus, drawing your tracks on the gamepad screen makes you forget for a moment that it's the first time in ages you've really used the screen for anything sensible.

Well, as was to be expected. WiiU came in last behind all the other consoles - except the Wii. 6% market share. Super Mario 3D land at number 14.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/30/microsofts-xbox-one-wins-early-sales-battle-on-black-friday/

Looks fun, but not $85 fun. Too bad.

@ChrisCostabile: lol, it's a roller coaster, man. You can look around with the gamepad and watch the crazy drops unfold before you. Your roller coaster. The one you designed.

Have you ever been on a real roller coaster? What more where you expecting to be able to do? It's all about the ride. My kids were screaming with joy.