

Nintendo's Wii-U misunderstands what made the Wii a success - th3james
http://analogmoment.com/post/nintendos-wii-u-misunderstands-what-made-the-wii-a-success

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Someone1234
Good article. Interesting thoughts.

> and that name certainly didn't help, I suspect most people didn't know it
> was a different console from the Wii

I've met people who even now think the Wii U is a new controller for the Wii.
The "New 3DS" isn't any better. Nintendo suck at naming.

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th3james
Yeah, I'd forgotten about 'New 3DS'. Almost as bad as the iPad Air > iPad 2
mess Apple had going on.

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ggchappell
An interesting article, but there is an important point that I don't think it
addresses as well as it ought to.

> Gathering people in front of a big screen in a living room to play together
> is an experience that smartphones can't match.

True. Wii games are something people do _together_. With all the ways we twist
the word "social" today, it can be easy to forget that (say) Facebook is not
really _social_ in the way that two people playing Mario Kart on a Wii in the
same room is. Facebook is you staring at your own screen. The same goes for
many multiplayer games. The Wii is different.

But the Wii-U is _not_ different. Everyone gets a handheld screen. Of course
there is the big screen that everyone can look at, but does anyone actually do
that? In the Wii-U commercials, all those excited, happy people are constantly
glancing from the screen they are holding to the big screen and back.
Obviously, the actors were told to do that; I doubt too many real people do
it.

That changes things greatly. People playing a Wii game in the same room are
_together_. People playing a Wii-U game in the same room are not.

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lttlrck
Everyone does not get a handheld screen - there is only one Gamepad per Wii-U

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ggchappell
Really now? Well, my comment was based on Wii-U commercials, which seem to
have misinformed me.

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cobralibre
Bear in mind that the majority of the Wii U's best-selling games support local
co-op multiplayer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_Wii_U_vide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_Wii_U_video_games)

But one of the major points of the article is that the Wii Remote made local
multiplayer gaming enticing to casual gamers, and the Wii U Gamepad does not.
That's fair. But I'm not convinced that _any_ Wii title besides Wii Sports
actually achieved the goal that the author claims to characterize the best Wii
games generally. For example, the best-selling Wii game was Mario Kart 8, but
my impression is that few gamers, casual or otherwise, found the motion
controls appealing after the initial novelty had faded. And there's a strong
sense among many Nintendo observers that while Wii Sports was a brilliant
game, it was also a dead end.

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ZeroGravitas
They did make a more accurate "Wii Remote 2", except its called Wii Remote
Plus and came out before the Wii U.

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th3james
Good point, I shall update the post to clarify

