No, the Wii U’s problem isn’t smartphones and tablets, it’s the system’s anemic games lineup, a lineup of mostly middling games with less than a handful of must-haves. That gamers are still willing to shell out big bucks for games and set historic records while doing so speaks for itself. Make every game on Apple’s App Store $40 to $60 and you’d see a better-than-David Copperfield-caliber magic trick as the market vanishes overnight. We’re taking about games that cost $40 to $60 each, not $0.99 or nothing at all. And looking past Nintendo, explain an entertainment juggernaut like Grand Theft Auto V, which made over a billion in three days, claiming the title “fastest moneymaking entertainment product” in history (across all genres and mediums)
If smartphones are really killing console gaming (as opposed to complementing it), explain the 3DS. Zombies, Bejeweled, or today’s numero uno paid game, Duck Dynasty: Battle of the Beards. But I’m not convinced the lion’s share of people who buy and play the Xboxs, PlayStations and Wiis of the world are shifting en masse to play perennial (read: stuck) chart-toppers like Angry Birds, Plants vs. The AP assumes the Wii U’s lagging sales are due to “a shift to gaming on smartphones and tablets.” I don’t doubt that’s part of it. In any event, it’s hard to imagine the company making good on its goal of selling nine million Wii U systems for its fiscal year, which ends next March. The company dropped the price of its deluxe Wii U from $350 to $300 during the last week of August, so we’re probably only seeing a month’s worth of sales bump from that: System sales doubled to 300,000 units, up from 160,000 during the prior quarter. It’ll be hard to tell how much that price drop helped Nintendo when its next quarter results come in, since any price-related lift is going to be conflated with holiday sales. As Nintendo notes, “The Wii U hardware still has a negative impact on Nintendo’s profits, owing mainly to its markdown in the United States and Europe.” Profits only tell part of the story, of course. So no surprise, Nintendo’s reporting a poor last quarter, marking down an 8 billion yen ($81 million) loss for July through September, which as the Associated Press notes essentially wiped out an 8.6 billion yen profit in the prior quarter. That’s it - a veritable desert of gaming. U and Nintendo Land - not bad, but hardly Super Mario 64-caliber - followed by a slew of middling ports and the odd exclusive standout: LEGO City Undercover, Pikmin 3 and The Wonderful 101. Imagine if third parties had been onboard with the next Okami, World of Goo or Cave Story. Imagine the system a year ago, had Nintendo launched with games as strong and anticipated as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a new Super Mario Galaxy, a Super Smash Bros.
That’s my reaction to the Wii U for most of 2013 - it would be a good idea, if only Nintendo had the software side of things in hand. The reply: “I think it would be a good idea.” Not Microsoft, not Sony, not the most beloved indie developers - no one.īut then I look at the Wii U and think about that quote, supposedly from Gandhi, where someone purportedly asked the Indian nationalist what he thought of Western Civilization. No one has Nintendo’s IP or manages to capture that sense of bounding through buoyant, sometimes hallucinogenic, always artful vistas.
Follow love the idea of the Wii U: about the size of an Iomega Zip Drive dipped in glossy black - a trifle bigger than the Wii, but still half that of the competition’s comparably desktop-like boxes a tablet that’s not really a tablet but enough like a tablet to draw you in, then woo you with novel, occasionally fascinating second-screen gameplay and of course, Nintendo’s stable of iconic characters and franchises and timeless gameplay ideas.