By Furious Francis editor-in-chief of Playeressence.com
The Wii was Nintendo's most successful home console ever. Its nearing 100 million units sold worldwide and pioneered motion control technology for the mainstream consumer. Despite Nintendo's success, a majority of 3rd Party developers did not enjoy the same success Nintendo had selling their games to the fanbase. There is concern that, that trend will continue with Wii U, but like Lee Corso would say "Not so fast my friend". The Wii U is a whole different beast than the Nintendo 64, Gamecube, and Wii. To relegate the Wii U to suffer the same fate is not only premature but an uneducated statement. The Wii U will have many developers developing games for the system, especially Japanese developers. It could actually become the PS1 of the next generation.
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Look at Black Ops II on PC and compare to consoles, not a huge difference yet a PC blows away the consoles in specs. Even if the PS4/360 destroy the Wii U in specs it means nothing since any game company can now port to all 3 consoles (unlike the old Wii). We already know the Wii U has some great exclusives, I'm excited to see what the other 2 can pull out :)
Now for my snarky comment....
More like the DREAMCAST of it's time.
Yes it will. The author of the article brought up very good points. Wii U will be the RPG preferred console of choice (that allow will make it own the Jap market). Nintendo is also being very smart with letting developers set their own price for their download content and Nintendo will not charge any fees for developers to distribute patches and DLC content (Microsoft and Sony do) which will make their platform very attractive for developers. Time will tell but I see how one can make that comparison at this early stage.
The way i see it, next PS/Xbox will be 4-5 times powerful than WiiU and it will not have the success the Wii did.
All Sony & Microsoft needs to do is to announce the next gen. consoles right now ( they should have done it earlier tbh ) so people who already own current gen consoles would hold off on buying the WiiU and wait for the next gen consoles.
It will be the same case of the PS2/Dreamcast.
The Sega Saturn sold 9.5 million consoles and its successor , the Dreamcast, sold 10 million consoles. That seems very harsh sales figures on the Dreamcast as, despite some quirky titles, it was aimed at a much broader audience than the Saturn which specialised in fighting games.
Like the WiiU, the Dreamcast was also regarded by some as a mid generation console, lots of people seeming to go along with the Sony idea of 'the generation starts when we say it does'. Actually I think that the N64 squeezing out some great games late in its life may have also contributed to the DC not getting larger sales.
However if the WiiU replicates this kind of situation then it could expect sales slightly larger than the Wii. But there's one thing that might be a large hinderance to this:
that the original Wii has been seen by many people in retrospect as a Christmas gimmick circa 2006 - a craze that everyone decided to buy in to, many perhaps knowing that it was only a craze.
The Dreamcast situation suggests that the WiiU will need to impress technologically if it wants to get close to the Wii's sales, that we should no longer see shelf after shelf of mini game type games in HD. I don't think that large numbers of people will settle for anything that looks gimmicky twice in a row.
I think the WiiU will sell as much as the 360/PS3 has and if it manages that it will be fine.
But I bet that a sizeable number of people bought the original DC games anyway - it's not like they'd have known loads of people with a DC to get pirated games from.
It's still a relative tragedy for Sega that the Dreamcast, which was evidently as cool as anything, only managed to sell about 500,000 more than the Saturn, whose line up of games was never on the cards to make it a mainstream console.
A lot of people do still purchase digital albums however. 2011 was the first year digital sales beat out physical sales.
regardless, 228 million sales does equate to people still playing CD's.
Come to think of it, the newer Wii's have an audio CD too with Mario Galaxy soundtracks.
I had a Wii at launch due to its price if it wasn´t for that i probably wouldn´t have got one.
P.S I got rid of my Wii a long time ago due to the inability to play well with the way my room is set up. I bought my PS3 with move but due to my room design i cant really play it.
Selling past 50m is quite uncommon and N has only done it twice.
Meanwhile MS, and especially Sony, have less to worry about when it comes to casuals (though MS has been leaning towards catering to that audience to everyone else's detriment including their in house developers) and have an already established reputation with core gamers that almost 100% guarantees that the core audience will be buying MS and Sony's next console.
The Wii U will probably be successful, but it will NOT be Wii successful, or PS1 successful, and definitely not PS2 successful. That I would bet real money on.
So far, nintendo hasn't pulled any of that crap, and is even keeping their 3rd parties in line to stop them goinb overboard. Tekken wiiu for instance HAS NO online pass, while both the 360 and ps3 versions do.
I think there are plenty of people like me loving the no nonsense approach nintendo has, and hopefully keeps, going for it right now.
-I understand that you wrote this about your own opinion, but you have to understand that half of the things you pointed out here are subjective and the other half are things Nintendo couldn't really do thanks to an almost non-existent online service. That is to say, if the Wii had the same online services as PSN and XBLA, what makes you think Nintendo WOULDN'T use online passes and other such things? I bet with the Wii U you'll see it happen.
"So far, nintendo hasn't pulled any of that crap, and is even keeping their 3rd parties in line to stop them goinb overboard. Tekken wiiu for instance HAS NO online pass, while both the 360 and ps3 versions do."
-Reminds me of their relationship with 3rd party developers in the SNES days where Nintendo had strict rules to follow that many didn't like. You'll find that the bigger 3rd party developers will hold fast to their money grubbing and will most likely either force Nintendo's hand or just prevent their games from appearing on the Wii U.
"I think there are plenty of people like me loving the no nonsense approach nintendo has, and hopefully keeps, going for it right now."
-The console isn't even a week old. Give it time and you'll see Nintendo isn't the saintly company you believe it to be.
"I can't believe people really are betting their money on the Wii U."
Just because I purchased a Wii U doesn't mean I won't buy the next Xbox or PlayStation. And tbh I'm in no hurry for them either. My PlayStation 3 and Wii u will keep me very entertained.
To be honest, there seem to be a lot of issues surrounding the system at the moment. Glued together Wii CPUs, 5GB firmware updates that can potentially brick systems, no replacement game pads... CAN the system be great? Sure. But it's not starting out well.
I thought the Wii was the ps1 of its era... it brought in a whole new market of then "casual" fresh gamers.
The wiiu has launched with a huge library of decent-strong titles and an increased fanbase off the last gen... sounds like a new ps2 to me.
Regardless, looking forward to more great games.. hurry up, pikmin!
^0^//
"The wiiu has launched with a huge library of decent-strong titles and an increased fanbase off the last gen... sounds like a new ps2 to me."
Not even close, ps2 had phenomenal 3rd party support. Unless nintendo has some special fairy magic to compensate for merger hardware in the wii u.
It's dead meat when the real next gen consoles arrive, you can't get much cheaper than the wii u's guts.(minus the pad)
Next gen does not mean on par or slightly better than 7 yr old hardware or current gen technology.
Nintendo had no excuse to skimp on hardware a second gen in a row after all the money the wii made them. But even that will be spun into a positive by nintendo fanboys.
Just think of all the amazing environments and worlds nintendo could have had in their games, if they hadn't skimped on the hardware.
Oh well better luck in another 5-7 yrs. :P
If nintendo had soon a playable demo of the zelda game from 2 e3's ago, there wouldn't be as much negativity on n4g ect.
But didn't happen. Enjoy the Wii 2.