Gaming Nintendo Confirms Wii U Has Flopped, Slashes Sales Forecast By ~70%

[Hielkenator]

I also did not think much of the WiiU, at first ( playing NSMB U )
But after playing for a longer time ( Lego city ,Batman AC etc ) I think the WiiU is awesome.
Graphically it's also very capable even if most games to not focus on this ( last level lego city, Lego marvel, NFS U )

It just takes a while to get used to this 2 screen setup, it really does.
I know I took some time to get used to this style of gameplay.
But once you get used to it, wow...I never expected it to be so immersive.

As a bonus it also is a COMPLETE Wii console ( wich also can be softmodded )
You can play Wii games etc on your Wii UGamepad or stream its audio and use headphones for your Wii games ( or emulators ) alone.

ATM it also boots alot faster after the last update.

I think Nintendo did a horrible job marketing the WiiU.
A lot of people i talk to do not realize the Wiiu is a NEW console by Nintendo.
Most of them think the Gamepad is another addon for the Wii, like the balaceboard and the Udraw tablet.
Once I show them the games, they still aren't impressed.
Graphically the games aren't showing the Consoles potential in terms of graphics and to really appreciate this console you basically have to own it.
as I mentioned before : it takes awhile to get used to two screens and use them together ( Shifting your eyes from the gamepad and your TV )
In practice it's actually VERY different than what people are used to, even if the format sounds simple...

Shame that this is not picked up as well as expected.
For what it's worth: This console still has that "Nintendo feel" we all love.
And the available games are very, very good at least.

 

[Foxi4]

Are you predicting ps4 is not going to have a period where it's sales slump?

Of course sales will slump eventually - there's only so many consoles people can buy. We're not nearing that point yet though.

 

[EarthBound 2]

Some of my ideas are crazy and goofy a bit.I'm going to put my game project called "EarthBound Sub-Zero" on Kickstarter(I need to take my mum's Credit Card-first explaining why).But is it worth it?Finally i'll be veryfied user.

 

[blaisedinsd]

Of course sales will slump eventually - there's only so many consoles people can buy. We're not nearing that point yet though.

I think we are. Just a prediction. I think in a few months PS4 will be sitting on shelves just like Xbone and Wii U and I don't expect the record breaking pace to continue.

As I said I think there was some penned up demand that has Ps4 killing it during the launch window but I think once that excitement wheres off there is going to be a lull and it is only going to be games that can boost it after the launch window. I am not going to get one until the games are there. Ps3/360/Wii U are currently better systems to own and PS4 and Xbone are selling based on expectations of their future. If that future doesn't deliver.......

 

[VMM]

I think we are. Just a prediction. I think in a few months PS4 will be sitting on shelves just like Xbone and Wii U and I don't expect the record breaking pace to continue.

As I said I think there was some penned up demand that has Ps4 killing it during the launch window but I think once that excitement wheres off there is going to be a lull and it is only going to be games that can boost it after the launch window. I am not going to get one until the games are there. Ps3/360/Wii U are currently better systems to own and PS4 and Xbone are selling based on expectations of their future. If that future doesn't deliver.......

There is no reason why this future wouldn't deliver, PS4 and X1 are perfect for developers,
they're powerful and use a well-known architecture, ports from PC should be easy.
Many games going out now are also avaiable for X1 and PS4, and we'll probably see a lot more by E3.
It's safe to bet in those since their expectations are almost guaranteed.

 

[Foxi4]

Some of my ideas are crazy and goofy a bit.I'm going to put my game project called "EarthBound Sub-Zero" on Kickstarter(I need to take my mum's Credit Card-first explaining why).But is it worth it?Finally i'll be veryfied user.

You can't randomly start a project using someone else's intellectual property - enjoy the Cease and Desist letters if you do. In addition, don't even think about starting a project if you don't have even a barebones demo of your game - it's entirely pointless.

 

[osirisjem]

There is no reason why this future wouldn't deliver, PS4 and X1 are perfect for developers,
they're powerful and use a well-known architecture, ports from PC should be easy.

Interesting.
Does everyone agree with it ?

Are these statements true ?

The Wii U is hard to develop for because:
(a) the architecture is more difficult than the XBOX 1 and PS4
(b) the Wii U is significantly underpowered from a third party developer perspective.

Agree ? Disagree ?

 

[FAST6191]

[ports from the PC should be easy]Interesting.
Does everyone agree with it ?

Are these statements true ?

The Wii U is hard to develop for because:
(a) the architecture is more difficult than the XBOX 1 and PS4
(b) the Wii U is significantly underpowered from a third party developer perspective.

Agree ? Disagree ?

Eh..... yes but there are a lot of asterisks involved. The biggest of which is though most do not consider it beyond the unreal engine, or possibly the cryengine or source, the part that middleware plays in modern game development, and the licensing of the same, can not be understated. Likewise this is not the 8-32 bit era so there is not as great a call to understand every aspect of the hardware any more beyond basic rules of thumb (try not to use too much double precision floating point, you lack memory space but have memory speed so try for streaming setups.....) and maybe some graphics stuff (which Sony, MS and Unreal should have given you anyway). Hardware knowledge can still pay off but not as much as many would imagine, indeed you may not even be allowed to properly interact with it. Likewise what programming languages are available for the PC may not be avaialble (by license or in general) for the PSBone.
Now I imagine every game middleware company with a clue (that is not exclusively doing handheld/phone stuff) is already rushing to do what they can for the PSBone. Similarly I would not be surprised at all to see a PC game have a few function names changed and someone then hits recompile to get a fairly workable result.

On the Wii U it is largely a hastily cobbled together bodge job (see the discussions of its SIMD and multicore) on an already ancient architecture (it was old by the time the wii came along and long retired by the time of the Wii U)... that is also relatively speaking quite underpowered even if you managed to sort those issues (not likely) and come close to the theoretical performance. That alone might not be fatal as a lot can still be done if you want to, however we are back on the middleware thing and probably the questioning whether it is worth the effort thing. Difficult might not be the right word as I would happily bet that the PSBone architecture is more complex than the Wii U, however the problems inherent to it have been solved/mitigated/studied over the last few decades by basically everybody that wants to program anything where the Wii U I guess has a few people that punched the Wii and GC before into working order. Had the PSBone not basically been a PC then I might have some more hope for the Wii U but that is not the case and "what if" type discussions are even less fruitful than a lot of other time wasting we deal with.

 

[VMM]

I would happily bet that the PSBone architecture is more complex than the Wii U,

Both X1 and PS4 use x86_64 architecture, both CPUs are octa-core, so how is it any more complex than WiiU architecture?

 

[Foxi4]

The Wii U's architecture is convoluted, that's the problem. As FAST mentions, a lot of the PPC7xx's problems were fixed by adding more and more peripheral crap like the ARM core, but at the end of the day it's still an architecture that even IBM completely lost faith in.

As for calling the PS4/XBox One "practically a PC", I generally disagree with this stance since by the same token we can call the XBox 360, the Wii and the PS3 "Mac's". The CPU architecture used or the general setup has very little to do with whether a system is a video game console or not. All that said, the choice of x86_64 will definitely be beneficial simply because there's a whole lot of readily available x86_64 development tools that can be relatively easily ported over - this is not the case with highly-customized setups where the process is far more lengthy.

 

[FAST6191]

Both X1 and PS4 use x86_64 architecture, both CPUs are octa-core, so how is it any more complex than WiiU architecture?

I would have to get an instruction listing, CPU overview, general systems overview and whatever else to make the call properly but I would be shocked if the WiiU's powerpc and whatever else (it is a reasonable bet it is similar enough to the Wii stuff so http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Hardware/Broadway works) it has attached would beat a modern X86/X64 design with all the caching, core interaction timings, instructions, branch prediction, instruction requirements and general level of hardware interaction. A lot of that might well be abstracted away in the case of the PSBone though, both in general and because MS and Sony disallow fiddling at that level. Somewhat amusingly a lot of that increased complexlity stems from people trying to eek out another couple of years from X86/X64 by bolting things on, however there most of the things being done have been hammered into a somewhat more workable state (even if it is still relatively new ground in the whole APU and memory models) where the Wii U stuff smells of snatching the first working model off the engineer's desk.

Both seem to be somewhat modern systems and a very far cry from the ARM, PIC, AVR, 68K, 6502, 65802, 8080 and whatever other chips general programmers could reasonably be expected to know (have known?) assembly and system architecture for, however between them I would still bet the PSBone to be the more complex a setup by a good way.

 

[Foxi4]

A lot of common architecture problems spring from the fact that we're fixated on backwards compatibility, or so they say - we're just afraid of letting anything go because people might scream bloody murder. I hear a lot of engineers crying into the heavens about the sheer amount of legacy crap they have to deal with that will never see any use whatsoever from the average user but has to be there "because compatibility". Makes you wonder if we could squeeze out more out of future CPU's if we just burned the bridges and got rid of everything that's not contemporarily used... maybe even gradually move to a brand-new architecture that focuses on what's important in computing today, not a couple decades ago. Contemporary x86 can be compared to V'Ger from Star Trek - it started off as a small chip, more and more stuff was glued to it as time went by and before long it turned into a monstrosity so huge that people lost track of the actual starting point.

 

[FAST6191]

From what I have seen a lot of legacy stuff is increasingly emulated within the cores themselves (some of the server stuff makes for pretty good examples), be it as microcode or in general, and I imagine as the likes of FPGAs start to meet in price and performance with useful computing it is only going to get worse.

As for what to shoot for in the "forget legacy and go for whatever" scenario I am not sure. It would probably devolve immediately into the sorts of things you see in high performance computing where you get to either spend all your time managing cores or designing for a specific task (does it all need to be massively parallel/sequential or do you just have an awful lot of unrelated numbers that need crunching?). Likewise, and despite what I will say at the end, you would also likely be throwing away decades of compiler and language development and that is probably the bigger legacy. Maybe ARM and X64 will amount to something. Given Nintendo's entire R and D costs for the Wii U might have just about covered a few months of Intel's power bill though I doubt it will be their efforts that make it happen.

I saw a good presentation on the matter of X86 as well. Though I will happily join you in pointing and laughing it seems the legacy overhead might not be as much as it could be. As for the starting point in a world where evolution computing has been the dominant model for CPU design for years at this point....

In the end we probably also have to consider that it is not the little gamers and home users that put out the big money but industry and business; I dare say both of us have heard the line "this shattered widget that stopped being made years ago runs my business" enough that putting it right has consistently paid for a drink or two.

 

[EarthBound 2]

Well Foxi4 3D Modeling is very difficult to me.My mind is working very slow.Lots of things I'm doing wrong even advanced shapes like small boulders to Sonic 3 HD on Adobe Illustrator(I spent one year on basics),making Pinochio 3D Animations on 3DS Max.I have some drawings on DeviantArt,but I left third time this site.

Even Starmen.net,EarthBound Central,MOTHER 4 Chat,Satoru Shibata on Miiverse looked on my RPG fan game such as badly.

 

[osirisjem]

Well, after buying the WiiU, I found a few gaems for it too:
Nintendo Land for 10€ (original price was 69.95€)
New Super Mario Bros U for 25€ (original price was 69.95€)


Apparently quite a few places over here are dumping the stock at huge discounts, since all WiiU games were -20% and most were even more. Sadly the stock was relatively low, so I didn't get any other games (yet) from the sales

Big retailers are dumping Wii U hardware and software.
This is going from bad to worse.


http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-s-plan-to-quietly-kill-the-wii-u/1100-6418177/

Quality of Life Platform ?
I'll have to read about that. hmmm.

 

[Bladexdsl]

this is what happens when you refuse to change. making the same old mario games and relying on 1st and 2nd party games to keep your console afloat just doesn't work these days nintendo.

 

[Qtis]

Big retailers are dumping Wii U hardware and software.
This is going from bad to worse.


http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-s-plan-to-quietly-kill-the-wii-u/1100-6418177/

Quality of Life Platform ?
I'll have to read about that. hmmm.

To be fair, there were 360 and ps3 games on sale too. I was more interested in the WiiU side since i had just bought the console. Been checking some stores at other locations, but they don't have similar offers.

 

[emigre]

To be fair, there were 360 and ps3 games on sale too. I was more interested in the WiiU side since i had just bought the console. Been checking some stores at other locations, but they don't have similar offers.

It's hard to have offers on Wii U gaems when there's no Wii U gaems in the first place.

 

[Bladexdsl]

IMO iwata has to go his bringing the company down

 

[trumpet-205]

IMO iwata has to go his bringing the company down

That'll only happen if either himself step down or stockholders fire him. He denied having any intention of stepping down so you have to bet on the later one.

I do agree it is time for a new management team for Nintendo though.