So you’ve just finished the life cycle of one of the best-selling consoles ever. Took a big gamble on a funky controller setup, lowballed the competition in terms of processing power in a quest to reach a broader audience, and the gamble paid off! Crazy, who would have thought. What’s the next move? This is the position Nintendo found themselves in before this week, when we got a first glimpse at their answer. The Wii U was announced this week at E3 – and it’s a total departure from the Wii gameplan. The new gameplan? ZOMG EVERYBODY LOVES TABLETS LETS DO THAT.
The Wii was a shock to the console game both from a gameplay and a market perspective: it was completely outmatched in terms of hardware by the PS3 and Xbox 360, but it appealed to a much wider audience with funky wii-mote controls and quirky party games, at a lower price point. The hardware was so cheap, Nintendo was actually making money on the console itself at the end of the lifecycle, a rare event in an industry where the console is usually the loss leader (my roommate and I often joked that if the Wii broke, we’d just get another one in a box of cereal or a cracker jack box). The Wii outsold both the Microsoft and Sony competition, and inspired them to copy the Wii with the Playstation Move and the Kinect.
Maybe that’s why Nintendo had to pivot away from motion controls: the Kinect now looks like it will own that space, so why fight Microsoft on even footing? But the Wii U offering is still crazy weird, and doesn’t deserve to carry the Wii name (hopefully Wii U is just a prototype name anyway: it sounds like either a bad social game, or a person very confused about who they are speaking about…. “i just bought my we you today…. huh?”)
The Wii U looks like it returns Nintendo to the hardware battle, though without knowing what the next-gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft look like, it’s a little hard to say. But the real “draw” to the Wii U is the controller, which is basically a Motorola Xoom tablet with pieces of a Wii-mote grafted to the sides to make it more like a standard controller. It’s not the WORST idea, and I’m sure games will find some interesting things to do with it. But it feels like Nintendo just wanted a piece of the iPad/tablet craze, and less like the controller will change video gaming forever. Plus, having the controller be interactive isn’t even new, the Dreamcast did it years ago (quite successfully, too). It seems more and more to me like the Wii U is really a Dreamcast 2 in disguise: it’s got the same color scheme, the controller is rather rectangular with an interactive screen in the middle, and it’s bound to be weaker than the truly next-gen systems that will follow it by a few months. So it’s a weird play by Nintendo. Might still be good, and I was a Wii skeptic who was forced to convert after great games like Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros. And I loved my Dreamcast back in the day too. But it just seems strange to follow the Dreamcast playbook when that playbook basically knocked Sega out of the console market entirely.
danielmarkmiller.net 