Was the Wii U really that bad

ijustwannaplaywii

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I personally think it had a marketing problem. although we all know the game pad was a massive failure, I mean you literally couldn’t get a replacement or an extra. Not to mention the name, a name like Wii U just screams upgrade and not new console. And the backwards compatibility was a mixed bag from what I have heard also the capability’s were pretty bad plus it didn’t have a new Zelda game for a really long time and was just a shit switch lite. But was it a bad console?
 

Ryab

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I personally think it had a marketing problem. although we all know the game pad was a massive failure, I mean you literally couldn’t get a replacement or an extra. Not to mention the name, a name like Wii U just screams upgrade and not new console. And the backwards compatibility was a mixed bag from what I have heard also the capability’s were pretty bad plus it didn’t have a new Zelda game for a really long time and was just a shit switch lite. But was it a bad console?
I mean this is just coming off as bait, but I will put in my own personal thoughts.

It's marketing was it's biggest fault for sure. The first game they showed off for the system was NSMBU which is a massive mistake seeing it looks near identical to NSMB Wii. This along with the poor naming scheme and overall poor marketing, if anything confused people. Many didn't even know this was a new console. So many thought it was just some random add-on for the Wii. The early trailers focused so much on the gamepad, that they barely showed the actual system. This pushed the confusion even further. With the talk about the terrible marketing out of the way I'd like to add a few other mistakes along with it.

Past the marketing, the other issues with the system were just it's clunky nature. Like for some reason, instead of allowing you to load Wii discs directly from the OS, it made you boot back to the original Wii's OS? The system also fully contains the hardware to load Gamecube games, but they didn't allow it? All these random oddities tied with the poorly optimized and designed OS of the Wii U just killed it on arrival. There were so many issues that could have had such simple fixes, but they never got them. For example, the gamepad. This thing never felt great to use as a controller. It just felt so cheap. The thing was way too massive for most peoples hands, it had poor battery life, and Nintendo refused to sell replacements if yours broke. They also region locked these tablets for some reason? The over reliance on this new gimmick made navigation and basic usage of the system a chore. For example just wanting to change settings, such as wifi required the user to use the gamepad. For some odd reason the entire settings app will just tell you to configure everything on the gamepad. This means that if you don't have a working gamepad, or yours is damaged, Then you cannot even change a setting on this system.

In the end it was just a plethora of poor choices and design failures that did it.
 
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End_eR

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The WiiU is literally just a Wii but better plus a new gimmick, which in-itself was just a Gamecube but better plus a new gimmick. Like, OP can bait all he wants about its viability at the time of release, but currently it's pretty much my go-to console to play Wii U, Wii, and Gamecube games along with basically all Virtual Console releases.
 

V10lator

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you literally couldn’t get a replacement or an extra.
Why not? They did sell them seperately.
the backwards compatibility was a mixed bag
Wii U is the Nintendo console with the best backward compat in history (playing (almost? So far I didn't find a single one which didn't run) all Wii games. GCN compat just as good as Wii. Emulators (virtual consoles) for all consoles beside the 3DS. More horespower for homebrew emulators than previous consoles and so on).
the capability’s were pretty bad
What does this mean?
it didn’t have a new Zelda game for a really long
Same with the Switch and many other Nintendo consoles. Games need time to get delevoped.
was just a shit switch lite
A decade before the Switch was even an idea. Also technically it would be more true to say that the Wii is a Wii U lite and GameCube is a Wii lite. Does that make Wii and GameCube bad consoles?
was it a bad console?
Neither was it nor is it today.

Anyway, as others said: Your question isn't serious in any way.
 
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ZeroT21

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With only a good few 1st party games it still wasn't enough to compete. The low console sales numbers just didn't convince any devs to even try
 

Ryab

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With only a good few 1st party games it still wasn't enough to compete. The low console sales numbers just didn't convince any devs to even try
I can think of a ton of first/second party games on the system that were great. Of course most of them are on Switch now, but that doesnt really matter. Third party support was a bigger issue.
 

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the wii u...had a rough life
Kinda just goes to show how the quality of a console and its sales aren't necessarily correlated. Like, the PSP and Vita were great consoles that also just didn't get much third party support. The Wii U was poorly marketed, but as an all-in-one box for playing multiple generations of titles, it's very solid. And don't get me started on the Dreamcast; my beloved.
 

Mike_77712

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Kinda just goes to show how the quality of a console and its sales aren't necessarily correlated. Like, the PSP and Vita were great consoles that also just didn't get much third party support. The Wii U was poorly marketed, but as an all-in-one box for playing multiple generations of titles, it's very solid. And don't get me started on the Dreamcast; my beloved.
Agreed. Also I blame the wii u failing on being poorly marketed for sure, it's a superb emulation box especially with the gamecube support(native with vwii I think?) but it never truly recovered from that. Most people in my immediate circle thought it was a wii add on or something like that.

edit: I kind of want one now. especially with how easy it is to play gamecube games.
 

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Agreed. Also I blame the wii u failing on being poorly marketed for sure, it's a superb emulation box especially with the gamecube support(native with vwii I think?) but it never truly recovered from that. Most people in my immediate circle thought it was a wii add on or something like that.
Yeah, the fact that Nintendo literally just... turned off Gamecube emulation support and basically never advertised the vWii is criminally pants on head stupid. Like, of course the console never stood a chance. It got kneecapped.
 
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To be fair, the disc drive can't take GameCube discs, and Nintendont does a nontrivial amount of work emulating EXI devices that don't exist anymore.

They also do a nontrivial amount of work emulating Classic controllers in vWii VC, so who knows why there was never a GameCube VC. Between that and WiiWare they would have had the "ultimate emulation console" thing without homebrew's help xP

They really flubbed the OS imo. The Wii was nearly instant-on and while there were some long black screens it's not nearly as bad. The Wii U has to load for the settings menu, load for the menu overlay, load the menu back up again. I think they needed to clock the Starbuck WAY higher if they wanted to offload as much onto it as they did.
 
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Mike_77712

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Yeah, the fact that Nintendo literally just... turned off Gamecube emulation support and basically never advertised the vWii is criminally pants on head stupid. Like, of course the console never stood a chance. It got kneecapped.
it's been a while since I've dealt with the wii u but damn I forgot about most of the gamecube support details. it's almost like they wanted it to fail or something. I really don't get nintendo. The advertising was such a bomb on all levels
 

End_eR

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it's been a while since I've dealt with the wii u but damn I forgot about most of the gamecube support details. it's almost like they wanted it to fail or something. I really don't get nintendo. The advertising was such a bomb on all levels
I'll defer to Quark when it comes to the specifics of what all exists natively and what all Nintendont is doing for GC support, but yeah, Nintendo in general just seems to have lost the plot when it comes to backwards compatibility. I assume it happened around the point they figured out they could make more cash by selling older games on the virtual console so people would have to buy them multiple times.
 

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Lol. What a low quality shitpost.
1685493212297.png
 

The Real Jdbye

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I personally think it had a marketing problem. although we all know the game pad was a massive failure, I mean you literally couldn’t get a replacement or an extra. Not to mention the name, a name like Wii U just screams upgrade and not new console. And the backwards compatibility was a mixed bag from what I have heard also the capability’s were pretty bad plus it didn’t have a new Zelda game for a really long time and was just a shit switch lite. But was it a bad console?
It wasn't bad at all. I wish it would have sold better, cause the hardware was good. It got some heavy hitters released for it, but the lack of sales early on kind of doomed it, because 3rd parties didn't want to support it, which meant the library was lacking and it continued to not sell well.
I guess it sold poorly for 2 main reasons. Many people didn't like the gamepad. And games generally didn't take advantage of it or took poor advantage of it, which reinforced that belief that the gamepad is trash. Nintendo's marketing was so heavily focused around the gamepad, but that might've harmed more than it helped because they just didn't have enough to show for it to convince people that it was anything more than a pointless gimmick. Nintendo heavily marketing the gimmicky aspect that nobody liked then made people dislike the console itself. It didn't help that you needed to use the gamepad for certain things, hell, you needed it just to change the settings (wtf Nintendo, seriously)
Everyone I know preferred to use a Wii U Pro Controller. I personally liked using the gamepad, but the battery drained in days/weeks even when turned off so it was always dead when I wanted to play, That turned me off it a bit.
If the gamepad was optional (and wasn't a forced purchase inflating the price of the console) except for games that actually took advantage of it in unique and cool ways, like Nintendoland, and wasn't forced in games like Star Fox Zero where it was more of a hindrance than a help, or to do something as basic as changing the system settings, maybe the Wii U would've been a success.
 

ArgoRV

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as far as i know, the software development kit was a pita for many developers
they had to work really hard with complicated SDK, and system low resources to bring new games into WiiU, which many companies just dropped and didn't even tried.
Capcom was not present in a hard way on WiiU, neither Konami, Most of WiiU developers were just indie devs
Nintendo learned the lesson and Switch SDK was more friendly for devs
bad console, not for end user, but yes for devs
 

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The wii u is the ultimate Nintendo console. Has a slow loading menu but thats my only con and doesn't matter once you're playing games. I have like 20 of them
 

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