Hardware Wii U to sell below 20 million by 2019

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I believe they had to limit the Wii U to such low storage to cut costs. Most of the blame I'd place on the tablet controller. They could have probably made the system more powerful and added more storage if they hadn't included the tablet controller.
 

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1. People argue the most common thing about Nintendo, which is making new IP or stop remilking the same games, but while fans think that's the main problem it's really not.
When you Look at top Clothing, Electronic companies, what is the main key that they're selling? Yeah that's right Design, and Performance, and Nintendo doesn't really acknowledge
those two things (It's actually 3 but we'll get to that later).

2. I don't understand Nintendo sometimes, although I love Nintendo some of the stuff I say seems hateful when in reality it's not, it's factual. In addition, what about the previous consoles they made? Yeah almost every Nintendo console is a flawed gem (excluding Wii?), and that's why true fans like them, they seem to recognize what it truly is now I think, It's kinda acting upon an Independent route and not following the power house route. What I'm trying to say is Nintendo trying to be that Dreamcast that we've been missing? Nintendo has a large library of many fun games that we enjoy, but the only real success comes out of Nintendo is their great handhelds. I talk about Design and performance, but if they're trying to head that route on purpose, forget what I just said. It's kinda funny/silly that I even said that, but I really don't know what's going on with Nintendo direction.

3. When I first heard about next-gen, I was really excited for the future of gaming, when people seen the PS4, and Xbox One what did computer fans think? “They're finally catching up finally” next you see Non computer gamers talk about it and say "Man this look so realistic" but while you see the Wii U, Nintendo fans love it, but when it all comes down to excluding Nintendo fans, and Computer fans, we're all like what?

4. I love how Nintendo tried to once again stay in their own lane, and see how it goes, but that didn't go so well for them. What really has me wondering is how could you try to pull the Wii all over again? Although it was successful, why would you do it again and you know that people have been waiting for next-gen on consoles? That is the most silliest thing I've seen with Nintendo, yeah graphics don't matter, but it IS recommended to be apart of the gaming family tree such as Microsoft or Sony.

5.You see It lacks third party support because it has drawbacks (Which I listed above) to make you not even want to talk about it, The Wii U has earned the title Lord Voldermort in that sense and I hate it. The Wii U is a good console, but It lacks the Design, Performance and Name. I saw a Wii U commercial and my cousin thought it was an add-on? That's kinda scary if your'e a fan (which it is to me).

3. Wii was sale wise succesful, but it was never a gaming wise succesful. More rehash/remake/crap are on wii than the gamecube. Ask around who bought wii and how long they have spent their time on that system (Just a thought: 25% of wii buyers bought it because it was fancy/hyped and probably only touch the wii u once per month). There should be a survey about which console collect most dust.
 
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3. Wii was sale wise succesful, but it was never a gaming wise succesful. More rehash/remake/crap are on wii than the gamecube. Ask around who bought wii and how long they have spent their time on that system (Just a thought: 25% of wii buyers bought it because it was fancy/hyped and probably only touch the wii u once per month). There should be a survey about which console collect most dust.
Lol that's why I put a question mark on the Wii part :P , sorry I should've clarified. I know many people who had the Wii, and they say they play it time to time, the people I know say they prefer graphics so they can get an appealing out the system. I got a Wii because I don't really care about graphics and some great titles were on there. Likewise the hype was real for the Wii, I remember I got one for 50$ (Best Present ever), and that was 4 years ago, and I enjoyed the crap of it. I would trade my PS3 possibly if I could, but unfortunately I can't since great games like Persona 5, Metal Gear Solid 5 and Yakuza 5 coming out this year.
 
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I believe they had to limit the Wii U to such low storage to cut costs. Most of the blame I'd place on the tablet controller. They could have probably made the system more powerful and added more storage if they hadn't included the tablet controller.
You can't seriously expect users to make due with 8/32GB storage these days though, that's an amount the competition offers in budget versions of their last gen systems. As for the tablet, yes, it's partially to blame, but the main reason for Wii U's underperformance is sticking to the same old architecture Nintendo's used since the Gamecube that simply can't be pushed much further.
 

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You can't seriously expect users to make due with 8/32GB storage these days though, that's an amount the competition offers in budget versions of their last gen systems. As for the tablet, yes, it's partially to blame, but the main reason for Wii U's underperformance is sticking to the same old architecture Nintendo's used since the Gamecube that simply can't be pushed much further.


If they included say a 500GB HDD it would probably make the system bigger/heavier but yeah I would have preferred that over the minimal storage they include. Overall though I'm impressed. Nintendo's been maintaining the $300 price range for it's consoles (adjusted for inflation) since the SNES. I'm not sure if the reason for the underperformance is due to sticking to the same architecture or what.. I think it's more about maintaining a consistent, cheap price point.
 

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If they included say a 500GB HDD it would probably make the system bigger/heavier but yeah I would have preferred that over the minimal storage they include. Overall though I'm impressed. Nintendo's been maintaining the $300 price range for it's consoles (adjusted for inflation) since the SNES. I'm not sure if the reason for the underperformance is due to sticking to the same architecture or what.. I think it's more about maintaining a consistent, cheap price point.

I don't think it's so much of an issue since it supports USB HDDs, something the previous console generation (dunno about this generation) DIDN'T support, making storage cheaply and readily expandable. As for price point, I agree, in a world of $500 and up consoles and gaming computers, I think economically priced consoles is one key oft overlooked point that Nintendo has going for it
 

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If they included say a 500GB HDD it would probably make the system bigger/heavier but yeah I would have preferred that over the minimal storage they include. Overall though I'm impressed. Nintendo's been maintaining the $300 price range for it's consoles (adjusted for inflation) since the SNES. I'm not sure if the reason for the underperformance is due to sticking to the same architecture or what.. I think it's more about maintaining a consistent, cheap price point.
Okay, in that case, how come both the PS4 and the Xbox One outperform it in every single aspect and have a hard drive while simultaneously only costing around $50 more than the Wii U? Are you saying that if Nintendo dropped the tablet (which we know costs around $100), they could release a system on the level of the PS4/XBO? Does that mean that a Wii U on the level of the XBO/PS4 would cost around $350 minus the HDD or $400 with the HDD? Because I'd be goddamn game for that, that's an acceptable price if it had the tablet, the specs and the HDD.

No, the root of the problem is in the outdated build that was chosen specifically to be low-cost (on-going agreement with IBM and AMD regarding the chipsets), tried-and-true (three generations going, they have practice) and capable of backwards compatibility with the Wii (which they expected to be a selling point since the Wii sold better than cure for cancer). They wouldn't be able to match the performance of the PS4 and the XBO even if they wanted to simply because the PPC7xx roadmap is closed and the architecture is only alive because they keep it on CPR.

I don't think it's so much of an issue since it supports USB HDDs, something the previous console generation (dunno about this generation) DIDN'T support, making storage cheaply and readily expandable. As for price point, I agree, in a world of $500 and up consoles and gaming computers, I think economically priced consoles is one key oft overlooked point that Nintendo has going for it
Last generation consoles supported USB storage at a limited capacity, the Xbox 360 probably worked better with it than the PS3 did. It
is a hurdle because the average soccer mom doesn't know squat about USB hard drives and just wants to buy something with Nintendo's logo on that she can stick into the system and it'll "work". Buying external HDD's for consoles is not a common procedure, there's a ton of different brands and you end up confusing the end user. Not only that, it limits developers of eShop content out of the get-go as to maximize sales, they will attempt to develop games under the 8GB cap to still be marketable to users without an HDD, which I'm willing to wager is the majority of Wii U users.


While we're on the subject of Nintendo and external storage, don't you love how the Wii U has an SD slot specifically for BC purposes only that cannot be accessed in Wii U mode because... because... uhh... because the design of this system is half-baked? :)
 
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vahnx

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Okay, in that case, how come both the PS4 and the Xbox One outperform it in every single aspect and have a hard drive while simultaneously only costing around $50 more than the Wii U? Are you saying that if Nintendo dropped the tablet (which we know costs around $100), they could release a system on the level of the PS4/XBO? Does that mean that a Wii U on the level of the XBO/PS4 would cost around $400 minus the HDD or $450 with the HDD? Because I'd be goddamn game for that, that's an acceptable price if it had the tablet, the specs and the HDD.

No, the root of the problem is in the outdated build that was chosen specifically to be low-cost (on-going agreement with IBM and AMD regarding the chipsets), tried-and-true (three generations going, they have practice) and capable of backwards compatibility with the Wii (which they expected to be a selling point since the Wii sold better than cure for cancer). They wouldn't be able to match the performance of the PS4 and the XBO even if they wanted to simply because the PPC7xx roadmap is closed and the architecture is only alive because they keep it on CPR.


In the end they are all computers and worth roughly the same in parts, so yes, Nintendo could release a system in the same ballpark (in terms of price and specs) with Microsoft and Sony if they wanted to. With the tablet? No. Nintendo stuck with low cost components, made it slim and threw in a tablet to try appealing to a wider audience (since kids seem to love tablets).
As for backwards compatibility, they've always done that with their handhelds and then they started doing it for their home consoles since the Wii. It's part of what they do.
 
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In the end they are all computers and worth roughly the same in parts, so yes, Nintendo could release a system in the same ballpark (in terms of price and specs) with Microsoft and Sony if they wanted to. With the tablet? No. Nintendo stuck with low cost components, made it slim and threw in a tablet to try appealing to a wider audience (since kids seem to love tablets). As for backwards compatibility, they've always done that with their handhelds and then they started doing it for their home consoles since the Wii. It's part of what they do.
Calling the Wii U Gamepad a tablet is being very generous though, it's only a tablet at a very small range near the main system, it's completely useless otherwise - where are those Gamepad games Nintendo originally showcased? Coming out anytime soon? Ah, right, they're not because the Gamepad has no storage, that wasn't false advertising at all. Not only that, it's not particularly great as a tablet either - the screen isn't HD and the touchscreen is resistive. I still don't know if I'm buying the whole "the tablet costs $140" considering the fact that you can get an actual tablet for that price, and not a bad one either.

"Sticking with low-end hardware" doesn't work on home consoles, they did it with the Wii as a last ditch effort after the (arguable) failure of the N64 and the Gamecube. Let's face it - Nintendo spent somewhere in the ballpark of a billion US dollars developing the Gekko with IBM and then the system flopped big time, they wanted to get their money's worth so they upgraded it and shoved it into the Wii which was meant to be a low-end system for family games focused on motion controls - that's how it was marketed. Okay, I'll give them that, fair enough, but how was the Wii U announced? Last time I checked this was supposed to be Nintendo's grand slam, their welcome back gift to the mainstream gamer, or am I the only one without selective memory who actually remembers the original announcement? Nintendo backtracked from that idea faster than a maglev train once they realized that they're completely out of touch with the console industry at this point and now it's marketed as a low-end family alternative again. Sorry, I'm getting mixed messages here.
 
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Last time I checked this was supposed to be Nintendo's grand slam, their welcome back gift to the mainstream gamer, or am I the only one without selective memory who actually remembers the original announcement? Nintendo backtracked from that idea faster than a maglev train once they realized that they're completely out of touch with the console industry at this point and now it's marketed as a low-end family alternative again. Sorry, I'm getting mixed messages here.

I personally didn't even know it existed until I was Googling Nintendo stuff one day and "Wii U" came up as a suggested search query. I was curious and clicked on it :P

This was before I spent my life online, of course XD
 

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I personally didn't even know it existed until I was Googling Nintendo stuff one day and "Wii U" came up as a suggested search query. I was curious and clicked on it :P

This was before I spent my life online, of course XD
You must've been offline for quite a while - the Internet was buzzing with Nintenyearolds gloating how it's, I quote, "1.5 times more powerful than the PS3" and has "four times the RAM". The Hype Train was strong with that one, that's for sure. What really happened though was that Nintendo simply didn't expect Sony and Microsoft to completely steamroll them with their hardware, and when you don't expect to get steamrolled with netbook-level hardware that's not even that impressive, you're clearly out of touch.
 

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My purchase was still worth it.
Don't get me wrong, my lass has a Wii U and I actually do like it, but this isn't about my subjective opinion, it's about whether or not the system holds any water in today's marketplace and it just doesn't, it's not a very good console. Good games are good on any hardware, but they don't elevate the hardware in any way. The lack of support the Wii U suffers from is entirely Nintendo's fault, they signed the system's death certificate during the design stage. Had they gone door to door like Sony and Microsoft did, collected opinions from game developers and designed a system people will actually want to buy, the Wii U wouldn't be the underdog it is now. Nintendo has a big problem in the sense that they, I quote (I believe this is Iwata talking), they make "systems that run their games, not games that run on their systems" or something to that effect. That's all well and good, but you have to consider third-party support here - not everyone's Nintendo (a company that's already admitted that they underestimated HD development), the hardware has to be adequate if it's supposed to get mainstream support which was the initial goal.
 

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I believe they had to limit the Wii U to such low storage to cut costs. Most of the blame I'd place on the tablet controller. They could have probably made the system more powerful and added more storage if they hadn't included the tablet controller.

You know Nintendo, they had to pull that innovation out (It was worth it though). Nintendo is a different breed of gaming and that's what I like about them.

My purchase was still worth it. I enjoy my WiiU games and vWii mode with my older games and nintendont.

Yeah the Wii U isn't that bad if your a fan, but when you truly realize what it is, it hurts :sad:. Even with all the problems, I would still like to have one since it's different among other consoles.

Calling the Wii U Gamepad a tablet is being very generous though, it's only a tablet at a very small range near the main system, it's completely useless otherwise - where are those Gamepad games Nintendo originally showcased? Coming out anytime soon? Ah, right, they're not because the Gamepad has no storage, that wasn't false advertising at all. Not only that, it's not particularly great as a tablet either - the screen isn't HD and the touchscreen is resistive. I still don't know if I'm buying the whole "the tablet costs $140" considering the fact that you can get an actual tablet for that price, and not a bad one either.

"Sticking with low-end hardware" doesn't work on home consoles, they did it with the Wii as a last ditch effort after the (arguable) failure of the N64 and the Gamecube. Let's face it - Nintendo spent somewhere in the ballpark of a billion US dollars developing the Gekko with IBM and then the system flopped big time, they wanted to get their money's worth so they upgraded it and shoved it into the Wii which was meant to be a low-end system for family games focused on motion controls - that's how it was marketed. Okay, I'll give them that, fair enough, but how was the Wii U announced? Last time I checked this was supposed to be Nintendo's grand slam, their welcome back gift to the mainstream gamer, or am I the only one without selective memory who actually remembers the original announcement? Nintendo backtracked from that idea faster than a maglev train once they realized that they're completely out of touch with the console industry at this point and now it's marketed as a low-end family alternative again. Sorry, I'm getting mixed messages here.

Yeah it's hurtful thinking that Nintendo would pull the low-end all over again. You would think from all the sales of the DS, 3DS and Wii that they would actually make a consideration to elevate the hardware to today standards. The 3DS have many great 2D games, and the Wii U was supposed to be that console to show Top-tier games. Nintendo could've been officially apart of the crew with Microsoft or Sony, but those drawbacks are....
 

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Yeah it's hurtful thinking that Nintendo would pull the low-end all over again. You would think from all the sales of the DS, 3DS and Wii that they would actually make a consideration to elevate the hardware to today standards. The 3DS have many great 2D games, and the Wii U was supposed to be that console to show Top-tier games, and finally marking their name in the console world with the other two power houses.
I know what you mean. I often get sh*t from other users and I get called a hater, but all I really want is for Nintendo to hit its prime again, release a kick-ass console with proper support, something that won't require me to buy another system just to get both Nintendo exclusives and third-party games, and I've been waiting for quite some time. I sincerely hope that they'll drop PPC completely next generation (which will come sooner than anyone expects it to). The rumours about a "fusion" pair of system that use ARM and share software worry me a bit in that regard, as much as I find the concept to be great (after all, I'm a big fan of Cross-Buy games on the PS3/4/Vita). I just don't think ARM is beefy enough to compete in an x86 world, at least not yet. I guess we'll wait and see - it's only a couple more years now before a successor is released.
 
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I know what you mean. I often get sh*t from other users and I get called a hater, but all I really want is for Nintendo to hit its prime again, release a kick-ass console with proper support, something that won't require me to buy another system just to get both Nintendo exclusives and third-party games, and I've been waiting for quite some time. I sincerely hope that they'll drop PPC completely next generation (which will come sooner than anyone expects it to). The rumours about a "fusion" pair of system that use ARM and share software worry me a bit in that regard, as much as I find the concept to be great (after all, I'm a big fan of Cross-Buy games on the PS3/4/Vita). I just don't think ARM is beefy enough to compete in an x86 world, at least not yet. I guess we'll wait and see - it's only a couple more years now before a successor is released.

Yeah I agree, Nintendo has took to many wrong turns lately and what can they do? There only option (it seems) is the 3DS and the Amiibos. Also (I know little of ARM) if ARM are suppose to be high performance and low power usage, wouldn't dragging those two addition be risky? I'm not very familiar with fusion or shared software, but I do know little of ARM and somewhat 86x. I just looked up fusion and it mentioned something about AMD APU (Idk if that's the Fusion your talking about) and if that's the case I couldn't imagine combining the 2 together. I heard people say it's bad, I had an APU laptop and I tried playing State of decay... it was horrible, although it said I could run it at max.
 

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Yeah I agree, Nintendo has took to many wrong turns lately and what can they do? There only option (it seems) is the 3DS and the Amiibos. Also (I know little of ARM) if ARM are suppose to be high performance and low power usage microprocessors, wouldn't dragging those two addition be risky? I'm not very familiar with fusion or shared software, but I do know little of ARM and somewhat 86x. I just looked up fusion and it mentioned something about AMD APU (Idk if that's the Fusion your talking about) and if that's the case I couldn't imagine combining the 2 together. I heard people say it's bad, I had an APU laptop and I tried playing State of decay... it was horrible, although it said I could run it at max.
Both the PS4 and the Xbox One use AMD APU's, but from what I heard Nintendo's more interested in the new ARM Cortex A5x chips, like the ones the New NVidia Shield console is based on and they want to shove the low-power one into the handheld (A53) and the powerful one into the home console (A57). Of course this is all industry speculation and may turn out to be completely false, but it worries me nonetheless. Cross-platform software support is great, but I don't think mobile chipsets are quite there yet - perhaps they will be in a couple of years, but for now the high-power x86 trumps them in gaming. As far as APU laptops are concerned, they're not too bad and they're hard to compare with consoles since a laptop carries the weight of the OS and the drivers wheras consoles have shortened GPU API's, so they simply work better on lower end hardware compared to full-blown PC's.
 

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Both the PS4 and the Xbox One use AMD APU's, but from what I heard Nintendo's more interested in the new ARM Cortex A5x chips, like the ones the New NVidia Shield console is based on and they want to shove the low-power one into the handheld (A53) and the powerful one into the home console (A57). Of course this is all industry speculation and may turn out to be completely false, but it worries me nonetheless. Cross-platform software support is great, but I don't think mobile chipsets are quite there yet - perhaps they will be in a couple of years, but for now the high-power x86 trumps them in gaming. As far as APU laptops are concerned, they're not too bad and they're hard to compare with consoles since a laptop carries the weight of the OS and the drivers wheras consoles have shortened GPU API's, so they simply work better on lower end hardware compared to full-blown PC's.

I forgot that the 8th gen does uses APU's and if Nintendo Is interested in that chip for the handheld, that's pretty nice, on the other hand, I don't know for sure about the home console. Also thanks for elaborating on the APU's, I get the concept now, I didn't know what was the problem since it said I could handle it. By the way I could agree on the Mobile chipset part, I have had high speed phones lag like my Samsung Galaxy light (1.4 GHZ), but that's because it's a small phone and it produces a lot of heat, but that shouldn't be an issue? I also have a ZTE Zmax which is slightly lower speed (GHZ 1.2) but shows true performance because its a huge phone and have enough space instead of being crammed up in to a mini phone.

I always wonder, what if the PS3 cell processor was successful? It's pushes chunk loads of data, but It was difficult to program for. It always kept me interested for being so complex and different? But anyhow I hope to see Nintendo get out the hole that they're in (:.
 

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I forgot that the 8th gen does uses APU's and if Nintendo Is interested in that chip for the handheld, that's pretty nice, on the other hand, I don't know for sure about the home console. Also thanks for elaborating on the APU's, I get the concept now, I didn't know what was the problem since it said I could handle it. By the way I could agree on the Mobile chipset part, I have had high speed phones lag like my Samsung Galaxy light (1.4 GHZ), but that's because it's a small phone and it produces a lot of heat, but that shouldn't be an issue? I also have a ZTE Zmax which is slightly lower speed (GHZ 1.2) but shows true performance because its a huge phone and have enough space instead of being crammed up in to a mini phone.
The problem with ARM isn't heat, heat is the reason why you'd pick ARM for a low-power or portable device since ARM chips generally have a low power footprint. Thing is, when you're making a home console, heat or power consumption are not pressing issues, so there's absolutely no reason to pick an ARM chip, really.
I always wonder, what if the PS3 cell processor was successful? It's pushes chunk loads of data, but It was difficult to program for. It always kept me interested for being so complex and different? But anyhow I hope to see Nintendo get out the hole that they're in (:.
To be fair, the CELL was designed for science more so than for gaming and that's where it shines the most. I personally think it was a mistake on Sony's part to choose such a specialized architecture for a gaming system, it was too much to handle without a proper SDK. Thankfully they fixed that problem later with SDK updates and the PS3 was able to catch up to the 360 in sales, but it was a very expensive mistake for them to make. I'm glad they went with something more mainstream this time around, the CELL was just overengineered and not fit for purpose. In a lot of ways, ARM and CELL sit on the opposite ends of the architectural spectrum - there's no reason to use a low-power ARM chip in a home console, but there's no reason to use a high-power scientific CPU in a home console either. It's all about hitting the sweet spot, going for the perfect marriage of power, efficiency and simplicity, and I think that's where x86 sits right now, next to some of the newer PPC's. :rofl2:
 

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Yes I think that chart is wonky but ballpark of 20 million units for Wii U lifetime sounds about right.

I do think the gamepad has pulled the console down as it inflates the price. The console had a decent launch and has been struggling since and has not had a single true price cut yet. It hasn't had a price cut yet because it sold at a loss at launch.

I don't think a console more inline with industry standards would make a huge difference in the consoles sales even if it did make it better hardware. See gamecube which by most measures was pretty standard and easy to port multi platforms for. It had plenty of games that didn't sell too well because most gamecube owners had the system for Nintendo games. Gamecube was competitively priced as well.

I think outside of motion gaming fad the Wii sold well as the lowerpriced family friendly console. I still see families where their wii is their only gaming console and it gets played plenty. If Nintendo focused on that and came out with similar hardware that didn't have the second screen stuff baked in they could have sold it better as and launched at $250 and had a true price cut already. None of the second screen features have been system sellers, they could have focused on having it play Wii games with better graphics (I recall PS2 making PS1 games look better as feature that helped sell me on PS2) like having it upscale or something. Still promote that it supports Wii controllers and peripherals but also makes your old Wii games in HD and plays new Wii U games as well.

The main reason Nintendo can't compete with Sony and Microsoft is brand image. This spans multiple console generations of Nintendo not being cool. Gaming has matured and Nintendo has not. They would have done better to occupy the position the Wii continued to thrive in (after the motion control craze) rather than trying an expensive gimmic or an expensive attempt to become a Sony and Microsoft clone.

Overall the console still has some great games and I enjoy it and Nintendo is returning to profitability where they traditionally have been. The company will be fine and can continue to make profit and continue to make hardware and games even if they are only N64 Gamecube Wii U level of sales.
 

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