I have been thinking about what went wrong with Nintendo and if they can fix it. You look back at the Wii and what made it successful it was a totally brand new idea. Everyone has used a touchpad before, almost all a better touchpad than the Wii U pad. No one had ever used anything like the wiimote. It was something you can show off to anyone and instantly grab their attention. The Wii was innovative with the perfect companion game. It became the party game machine, the family machine. The capturing of the casual market allowed them to succeed last gen and maybe that is the market they should have stayed focused on. They still gave us gamers the games we love, just on inferior hardware. They were never going to capture the core gamer market and the third party publishers going head to head with MS and Sony, Nintendo knew this so they switched focus and it worked. They were very healthy for some years and the other consoles were very healthy, everyone was happy.

Then Nintendo decided to go back to the hardcore, a noble gesture but one they are paying for and may be a complete disaster. Of course their biggest mistake is making the hardware a gen back, this is the biggest cause of the lack and future lack of third party games. The Wii Pad is not innovative, its not new, its not something people can latch to and say wow this is cool I want. So the Wii U is not a system core gamers want and its not something casuals even pay attention to, who is this console for? The hardcore Nintendo fans? We are gamers, yeah i buy the console to play Nintendo games but I expect some other stuff. I enjoyed the Wii for three years, it had some cool third party stuff, I dont see that same thing happening with Wii U. The Wii made a great secondary console, I dont know if the Wii U can claim that, you cant ask people to pay over $300 just to play Nintendo games.

Many will point to GC and say Wii U will just be another GC. Gamecube is from another era when third party exclusives were still happening frequently. The GC had Resident Evil exclusivity, some Star Wars games, some other Capcom games, Metal Gear Twin Snakes, big time Sega support. There was plenty of the GC outside of the usual Nintendo games. Also the market was different, PS2 was the king with Xbox and GC fighting for sraps but it still worked for them and made them different. Now we have an era where all three consoles are huge successes and the third party exclusive is almost extinct.

Clearly the Wii U will not be another Wii, the concept simply isnt there and I dont see what they could do to fix it. If they dont get the casuals why would the core get the system if all it has are Nintendo games. It won't be like GC cause there wont be many third party exclusives and that is during this first year when they could keep up. What happens next year when all dev teams shift to new graphics and leave Wii U in the dust. What happens when the new Xbox and PS4 sell well, both outsell the Wii U easily, both offer a huge library of new games and features. Why would third parties put their game on the Wii U? Why would people buy a Wii U without third parties? They are stuck.

Can Nintendo survive on their brand alone, I guess but its going to end up with sales worse than GC, that seems like a total faliure to me. Nintendo needs to refocus and decide what do they want to be. If they do want the core (which they will never get) they have to be up to par with modern systems first before addressing anything else. If they want to do the Wii again they need another spark of innovative concepts, the Wii U is lacking in them. I guess I should have seen this coming but I expected the Wii U would capture more of the casuals than they have. I expected half the sales of the Wii which would still make it a successful system. But I dont see how this system will sell more than the GC at this point, its only going to get worse once the others hit.