While the Wii U's early sales numbers are nothing to sneeze at, the launch as a whole probably could have gone smoother.
A large, mandatory system update upset many users. There were sporadic system outages. And some anticipated features were not available on day one (though several of those have launched since).
While the company's global president has apologized for some of the bumpy parts – specifically the hour-plus long mandatory system update – Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, takes a different approach.
While regrettable, he said in a talk with Gamasutra, the last-minute release of the patch was necessary, so the team could ensure the online functionality worked as smoothly as possible.
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I own 360/PS3/PC/Wii U, and deal with updates with all systems and games as part of the process.
But I have found it immensely funny that with this being the norm for a decade basically, everyone jumped on Nintendo like it's all their fault and it was so much worse for them to do it.
Especially coming from a bunch of PS3/360 fanboys who have had to deal with all sorts of things regarding updates. How many times did we see an xbox update screw up live for a day or so? How many times did we see an xbox update cause major problems with some users that they had to do another update to fix the issue? PS3 was notorious for long updates and them being fairly frequent.
This is what happens. What I found amazing was so many people who have experienced that, railed about Nintendo's day 1 update.
I mean really, it's been all over the place and over hyped more than the Furby and Pokemon combined.
They most certainly didn't get a pass. But the fact remains, it's part of everyone's life now, so people need to grow up and accept it as part of gaming. We've had a decade to get used to it.