Introduction
In 2005, the best known name in video game publishing and manufacturing -- Nintendo -- announced the successor to their GameCube home console. The codename for the new system was as provocative as it was predictive: they called it the Revolution.
From a lesser company, this name would be hyperbolic at best and hubristic at worst. Nintendo, however, delivered on the implied promise of the name in the ultimate form of the Wii. Through a smart combination of innovative motion controls, beloved Nintendo franchises such as Mario and the Legend of Zelda, and a focus on the largely untapped casual gaming market, the Wii would go on to sell over 100 million units, making it one of the bestselling home consoles of all time. It certainly lived up to its revolutionary codename and as the system's life cycle began to reach its end, Nintendo fans and the broader gaming public were extremely interested in what Nintendo would come up with to succeed its runaway hit.
At the E3 gaming trade show in 2011, the world received its answer...sort of. Reggie Fils-Aimé, the chief operating officer of Nintendo of America -- and longtime internet meme -- ascended the stage and delivered the following statement:
You might remember how the Wii name made perfect sense when you started hearing it as "we." It was clear how much fun we all had playing together, even with people who weren't gamers before. But in thinking about a new Nintendo system, we knew the prevailing thought would be this: yes, the game will probably still be right for all of us, but could it also be a perfect fit just for you? And the answer to that question is an emphatic "absolutely." In fact, we're so convinced of it, we put that pronoun right in the name. So today, welcome to the world...of Wii...U.
This rather...abstract...introduction to Nintendo's new console was met with what I can only describe as light, confused applause from the audience. But you know, people were skeptical of the "Wii" name not that long ago, and we all know how that turned out, so most of the audience and other observers were willing to hear Reggie out. What followed was about 30 minutes worth of Reggie, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, and the company's resident game design genius Shigeru Miyamoto extolling the virtues of the Wii U's controller, called the GamePad.
Features
And to be fair, the Wii U GamePad controller is actually pretty cool. Naturally, it's wireless. At approximately 5 x 10 inches, it's Nintendo's largest primary controller to date. It's got a 6 inch touchscreen flanked by more traditional game controller inputs (face buttons, shoulder buttons, analog sticks, a directional pad) and resembles nothing so much as a tablet. It retains the motion sensing capabilities of the Wii remote as well as its speaker. While the overall size of the GamePad is obviously pretty large, it's not especially unwieldy and is designed to be as ergonomic as possible. Other features of the Wii U GamePad include a built-in camera, a built-in microphone, and NFC capabilities.
But what about that touchscreen? As demonstrated at the presentation, it can serve as a second screen similar to the touchscreens on the various iterations of the Nintendo DS handheld system, displaying ancillary information such as maps or player inventory. Additionally (and this sells it for me) many games can duplicate what's displayed on the television screen on the touchscreen, meaning if your spouse and kids want to watch TV but you don't want to stop playing, that's now possible.
Now you've probably noticed that this write-up has been primarily about the Wii U GamePad. You might even be forgiven for thinking that the GamePad is the Wii U. Well, that was how the E3 presentation left a lot of people feeling. The fact that Reggie and Iwata then showed a video with statements from higher-ups at companies like Ubisoft, Namco, and (perhaps most significantly) Electronic Arts praising the GamePad probably didn't do much to clarify the situation. They even brought out the CEO of EA, John Riccitello, on stage to heap praise onto the Wii U (and of course the controller) and talk about all the great content that EA would be bringing to the system thanks to a "breakthrough" in the relationship between EA and Nintendo. More on that later.
While the system itself didn't feature too heavily in its own announcement (bizarrely enough), there is of course more to the Wii U beyond the GamePad controller. For starters, it is in fact a video game console in its own right and not simply a tablet peripheral for the original Wii. It is the first Nintendo console with native HDMI support as well as the first Nintendo home console capable of a high definition video display up to 1080p. Like the GameCube and the Wii before it, the Wii U uses a proprietary disc format instead of the industry-standard Blu-Ray or DVD discs. It is fully backwards compatible with essentially every Wii game and Wii accessory. In fact, most of the multiplayer games on the Wii U require the use of standard Wii remotes or the combination of a Wii remote and a Wii nunchuck to function. The Wii U also offers a more traditional controller option in the form of the Wii U Pro Controller, which strongly resembles the basic XBox 360 controller; about half of the retail games released for the Wii U are compatible with the Pro Controller.
Like the Wii and the 3DS, the Wii U is wi fi enabled and of course has access to the Nintendo Network, which (obviously) is Nintendo's online service, including the Miiverse social networking platform, the Nintendo eShop that has exclusive digital content for Wii U software, and the Virtual Console that features full games from past Nintendo (and other) consoles available for purchase and download directly onto the system. The latter service has been one of Nintendo's most popular online features since its debut in 2006 on the original Wii.
The Wii U debuted in North America on November 18, 2012. At launch, there were two basic models available: a standard model with 8 GB of internal flash memory and a "deluxe" model with 32 GB. Various software and accessory bundles have been released over time, but these two basic models have remained the same. Now if you're at all familiar with the generation of video game consoles immediately preceding the Wii U (specifically the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3) then these hard drive sizes will probably leave you scratching your head since those older systems were offering hard drive sizes in excess of 250 GB by the time of the Wii U's release. Part of that is a function of the way the 360 and the PS3 load and process games in comparison to the way the Wii U does it. However, the Wii U does at least offer the option of adding up to 2 TB of external memory (though it is only compatible with certain brands of hard drives).
I'm not much of a specs guy myself, so I don't really know how much other people care about this kind of information, but the Wii U has a 1.24 GHz Tri-Core CPU, 2 GB DDR3 memory, and a 550 MHz AMD Radeon GPU. In terms of what this means for the system's capabilities as compared to the Microsoft and Sony consoles, the best I've been able to come up with is that the GPU and the RAM outshine the 360 and the PS3 but that the CPU itself still lags behind these systems that have been available since 2005 and 2006, respectively. There is really no comparison between the Wii U and the XBox One or the Playstation 4, both of which were released in 2013 and far outperform their predecessors (and the Wii U) in every regard.
Background
To understand the development of the Wii U and the subsequent marketing campaign behind it, you need to understand something about Nintendo as a business. Gunpei Yokoi -- the creator of the Metroid series as well as the designer of the original Game Boy, among other things -- introduced a design philosophy to Nintendo during his tenure there that he described as "lateral thinking with withered technology." Something is lost in the translation between Japanese and English, but "withered" in this instance is probably better rendered as "seasoned." What this means is approaching product design from the standpoint of finding innovative ways of using a well-known and well-developed technology rather than making technological advancement the be-all and end-all of design.
The Wii was a perfect example of this thought process. Released as part of the same generation as the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3, the Wii did not attempt to compete with those consoles on the basis of raw power or graphics or any of the other traditional metrics by which video game systems are judged. The Wii itself was about as powerful as the original Xbox from the prior generation of consoles. Unlike its contemporaries, the Wii had no HD display capability. The Wii also eschewed the then-standard DVD format for its games, correctly guessing that customers wouldn't be too put off by the console's inability to play DVDs (and neatly avoiding the need to pay the licensing fee to use the DVD technology in their system). Even the motion-sensing technology that defines the Wii has been around for a while, although it hadn't been used terribly much for video gaming applications up to that point.
But combining these "seasoned technologies" was something new and the technologies used were mature to a point where Nintendo was not forced to do a lot of research and development from square one. The result was that Nintendo spent more time and money on software and expanding their userbase. Conveniently, it also meant that Nintendo walked into the design and development of the Wii with a major economic advantage, namely that since most of the technology used to make it wasn't cutting edge, it wasn't particularly expensive. In fact, unlike the 360 or the PS3 (and indeed basically every new video game console at the time of its initial release), the Wii was profitable from the first sale. Questions about graphics or processing power aside, it's hard to argue against being profitable.
So it should not be surprising that the Wii U had a similar premise. By focusing on the then-current capabilities of video game consoles instead of looking to blow them out of the water, they could work within that realm to make use of a new, unique, console-defining feature. In this instance, that new feature was the tablet-like GamePad. Seeing the shift toward mobile gaming and consumer interest in mobile devices more generally, both Sony and Microsoft had begun searching for ways to let customers integrate the devices they already owned into the ecosystems of their consoles. Nintendo went a step further and provided the device directly to the customer.
With the Wii and to some extent the DS, Nintendo deliberately made a play for demographics that video game publishers/manufacturers/developers/etc. (including Nintendo) had largely ignored up to that point. I'm sure most of us remember the commercials showing elderly people playing the bowling minigame on Wii Sports or women in yoga pants using the Wii Fit balance board to weigh themselves or any other number of people and activities not traditionally associated with a 20-something guy hunched over a controller in a dark basement trying to get the most headshots. In other words, the stereotypical core gamer was not Nintendo's main target audience, even though they still captured some of that market by virtue of the fact that Nintendo owns popular properties like Mario, Zelda, and Metroid that core gamers love.
Issues
One of the downsides to basing your business around people who don't know much about your product (or your competitors' products) is that you have to do a lot of work in educating your customers. Anything technological -- especially a niche hobby like video games -- is going to involve sort of a hurdle in that realm. Now I don't have anything against the elderly, but certain stereotypes exist for a reason. If you are under the age of 45 and you have living relatives above the age of 65, you have probably been on the receiving end of a phone call where you've been asked a question like "now how do you get the clicker to work on the thing?" Or you've had to fix a really slow computer with about 50 browser bars installed. Or you've had to set up a Wii.
Not to belabor the point, but a lot of the people who bought the Wii were first-time video game buyers with very little experience with or knowledge about the video game industry. So the people who made the Wii a meteoric success were being asked to do the same for the Wii U despite the fact that Nintendo didn't really have a good way of explaining it to them. The only thing Nintendo marketed was the GamePad and a lot of the casual Wii customers believed it was just an add-on to the original Wii like the balance board or additional controllers. And with a $350 price tag, who needs that kind of add-on? The Wii U was aimed at people who don't feel they need the latest and greatest iteration of everything. It doesn't matter to them that you can only play Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U. They've already got one Wii, why do they need another? It's the same principle as someone getting an iPhone 5 and skipping the 6, 7, and 8 because the iPhone they already have works just fine regardless of the new features available for the more current models.
Regardless of the reason, Nintendo's new casual audience didn't grant the Wii U the same success that they did the Wii. Whereas the Wii sold over 100 million units, as of March 2017, the Wii U has sold approximately 13 million units. This means the Wii U is Nintendo's worst-selling home console by a pretty wide margin; the next worst-selling Nintendo console is the GameCube with 21 million units sold. Ouch. But surely the inability of the Wii U to appeal to the same casual market wasn't the only reason the system underperformed.
What happened?
It's of course impossible to read customers' minds and find out why they didn't buy something. But a lot of the problems with the Wii U have their origins in the Wii. As mentioned earlier, the Wii was a less powerful system than its contemporaries. Nintendo and most third party developers for the Wii tended to shy away from attempts at photorealism and a lot of the features that became generation-defining in the period from 2005 until 2013. Third party support for the Wii was...interesting. With the absolutely insane sales numbers being thrown up by the Wii month after month after month, everyone wanted a piece of that action. So a company like Activision is left with something of a dilemma: they're doing huge business with the Call of Duty franchise on the 360 and the PS3. It's not that difficult to make a game simultaneously for those two platforms but for the Wii...well, that's a different story. It would involve a significant downgrade of the game's graphics, processing, character and level design, etc. It would essentially be developing an entirely separate game from the ground-up. So while multiplatform releases from major companies showed up on the Wii, they were typically less sophisticated and less realistic than their 360 and PS3 equivalents.
Because of the technical limitations of the Wii, the system missed out on some of the most important releases of that generation. Major commercially successful titles such as the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and all games in the Grand Theft Auto and Battlefield franchises (just to name a few) were absent. Instead, third party developers focused on providing either downgraded versions of their major hits from other consoles, updating and re-releasing old Playstation 2 games, or making and releasing really low-effort mini game compilations. In other words, the Wii by and large became the repository for all manner of shovelware.
So having said all that, it makes the statements from the EA and Ubisoft people at the 2011 E3 conference that much more significant since the whole point of the thing was to show a real change in the way third party developers interacted with Nintendo. Well, all of that went out the window after the Wii U's launch in 2012. There was apparently a pretty steep learning curve in programming for the Wii U. Problems with the Wii U's architecture prevented EA's new Frostbite game engine from working on the system. Since basically all of EA's major titles at that time used the Frostbite engine, this precluded EA from living up to their promises of an unprecedented relationship with Nintendo during the era of the Wii U (especially since the console's sales were not high enough to rationalize creating an entirely new engine just for the Wii U). Other developers conspicuously dropped off the map as well, drastically reducing the Wii U's release schedule outside of first party games or third party Wii U exclusives (of which there were very, very few). Even the shovelware dried up since there wasn't really any money in it anymore.
Final Thoughts
Not one to beat a dead horse forever, Nintendo discontinued the Wii U in January 2017. Their next home console, the Nintendo Switch, was released in March. So far, it is on-track to outsell the Wii U by a pretty significant margin; whereas the Wii U sold approximately 13 million units in a little more than 4 years on the market, the Switch has sold around 10 million units 9 months into its life cycle. The Switch also has a much stronger software lineup after its first year on the market, featuring multiple new top tier first party titles as well as re-releases of huge games from prior generations like Skyrim and LA Noire (signaling an attempt to recapture some of the core gaming audience that Nintendo had been steadily losing up to that point). The Switch also owes a debt of gratitude to the Wii U in the sense that it also integrates a tablet, although the comparisons basically stop there. Games on the Switch tablet can actually be played on the go unlike the Wii U's tablet, which was synced up to the console and could not be too physically distant from it to work.
Reggie Fils-Aimé has come fairly close to admitting that the Wii U was a giant mistake, although he did so by euphemistically calling the Wii U a necessary stepping stone to get to the Switch. He's further stated that he thinks people will eventually come to remember the Wii U fondly despite its issues in the same way that people now have a generally positive attitude about the Gamecube. And this might ultimately turn out to be true; the Wii U, for all of its faults, had some pretty great games. Wii U-exclusive titles like Bayonetta 2, Super Mario Maker, the HD remake of the Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, and Splatoon were all excellent. However, I think it's fair to say that multiplatform releases appearing on the Wii U like Batman: Arkham City or Call of Duty: Ghosts will never be considered the definitive versions of those games. This makes the Gamecube comparison even more appropriate since while it was loaded with classic exclusives, the general multiplatform third party selection wasn't anything to get excited about.
Through the years, Nintendo has been both very intelligent and very lucky. They undoubtedly have the strongest first party lineup of any video game company thanks to a stable of beloved characters like Mario, Zelda, Link, Donkey Kong, Samus, Star Fox, and so on. Almost all of their first party releases are massive hits; for example, the best-selling racing game of all time is Mario Kart for the Wii. Unfortunately, that pedigree was not enough to make the Wii U an attractive or even comprehensible upgrade for the vast majority of the Wii's users who seemed to care less about stories or franchises and more about the fun, social aspect of gaming. The release of the Wii happened to come right at the same time as the explosion in popularity of the Guitar Hero franchise, which is one of the luckiest coincidences you could imagine. Guitar Hero of course wasn't the first music/rhythm game ever released but it quickly became the most popular due to its guitar-shaped controller and its broad selection of popular Western rock music (most music games up to that point featured j-pop or Western rock from relatively unknown artists). Later iterations of Guitar Hero as well as the similar Rock Band franchise would eventually incorporate singing and drumming and add to the social experience, making it a perfect fit for the Wii.
By the time the Wii U was released, however, the music game bubble had burst and motion control fatigue had definitely set in. There was no rising gimmick or trend in gaming onto which Nintendo could latch itself. Sure, VR was making a comeback, but the expense associated with incorporating that into a Nintendo system would have been astronomical if it were even technically possible. Nintendo was essentially left with no option other than to look at the broader technological trends for inspiration and of course mobile devices were the obvious answer.
In some ways, the Wii U was both ahead of its time and behind the times. I say ahead because the popularity of the Switch has shown that gamers like the idea of being able to have instant portability of their gaming experience through a mobile device. The caveat is that they want that experience to be as close to what they get on the big screen as possible without having to keep the main console in their line of sight; the Wii U didn't offer that. Since the Switch tablet is the actual console, that problem is solved pretty neatly as long as you keep everything charged. While it was slightly more powerful than its contemporaries (the 360 and the PS3) at its 2012 launch, this advantage was rendered somewhat moot because (a) nobody was making games for the system and (b) the Xbox One and Playstation 4 were less than a year away from launch and they would both represent massive upgrades over their predecessors and leave the Wii U in the dust.
So what's the final word on the Wii U? It's something of a mixed bag overall. The initial $350 pricepoint was a major impediment to the system's success; it was Nintendo's most expensive system to date with the Wii having debuted for $100 less just 6 years earlier. Since it's no longer in production, there are not really any "new" systems available at this time. If you're interested in getting a Wii U, you'll almost certainly have to go through a pawn shop or somewhere like GameStop to get one. Prices seem to be hovering somewhere between $150 and $200 right now. If you buy one of these systems, you'll almost certainly just be buying it for the exclusive games. And like I said, the Wii U has a great selection of exclusive titles, but I don't know if they're good enough to rationalize buying a dead system. The multiplatform releases surely aren't, even with the added Wii U tablet content. I think what will eventually happen to the Wii U on the secondhand market is what already happened to the Gamecube and to some extent the Sega Dreamcast before it: the systems themselves will become super cheap and the good first party games that everyone wants will skyrocket in price beyond all reason.
Like Reggie said, the Wii U is probably best seen as a transitional step between two systems. Nintendo is fortunately very good at learning from their mistakes. Now whether or not you now want to invest in that mistake is a question that can only be answered by how much you love Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country.