Understanding the Wii U's Failure

If you read too much game journalism and too many neogaf forum posts, you probably think Nintendo's current problems stem from not making the Wii powerful enough and "losing the hardcore." This is completely false. First, let's dispel a few myths about the Wii itself.

1. Wii owners didn't buy games. This is, of course, completely false. The Wii's tie ratio was 8.8. This isn't record-breaking, but it's within normal historical bounds. Nintendo's highest-ever tie ratio for a home console was for the Gamecube, with a tie ratio of 9.6 . Its lowest was for the N64, with a tie ratio of of 6.8. 8.8 is pretty close to the NES tie ratio of 8.1. Notably, the Xbox 360 and PS2 each had a tie ratio over 10.
2. Wii owners didn't buy sequels. The games that sold the Wii were Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Mario Kart Wii,  New Super Mario Bros Wii, and Wii Play. With the exception of the two Mario-themed games, which did not get sequels, the sales of the sequels to these games sold on par with the original releases, as seen on this list of best-selling Wii games.
3. The Wii was a fad. The Wii consistently sold well from its launch in November 2006 through early 2010. That's too long to be a fad.

So what actually happened? If you look at the top of the list, you'll notice all the best-selling games (really, the system-selling games) were released before 2010. To understand what happened, let's break Wii games down into three categories:

• New Market Games -- Straightforward, neutrally branded, family-friendly titles that can be played in short play sessions. Simplicity should not be confused with lack of polish. Includes games such as Wii Sports and Just Dance.
• Old Market Games -- Games that focus on graphics, epic music and stories, and require a significant time investment to enjoy. Examples include the Legend of Zelda, Soul Calibur, and Call of Duty.
• Shovelware -- Poor imitations of popular ideas that rely mainly on consumer ignorance. This includes everything from Ninjabread Man to Shellshock: Nam '67.

The New Market Games mostly sold very well. Nintendo was almost the sole developer of any real new NMGs, but there were a handful by other developers. There were some misfires, like Wii Music, but overall, this was a successful direction. Old Market Games, which the game media and forum posters focus on, tended to do poorly (the market for these titles was mainly on the HD consoles), and shovelware only had a brief spurt of popularity until the new market wised up to this trick. Third Parties tended to confuse the simplicity of Wii Sports with bad quality and couldn't figure out why their garbage didn't sell. This overall hurt everyone, as customers came to rely on Nintendo branding to sort out good from garbage. The Gamecube

What happened in 2010 was some kind of developer revolution at Nintendo. Nintendo basically stopped releasing NMGs at this point, the only one being Wii Party. Around this time, Shigeru Miyamoto, Eiji Aonuma, and Yoshio Sakamoto began speaking very openly about their personal visions for gaming and the direction they were going to lead the market. Essentially, they declared that now that the Wii was so successful, they were going to start producing the kinds of games that failed to sell the Gamecube. The idea seemed to be that the reasons games like Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine failed was that the Gamecube didn't sell well, not that the Gamecube failed to sell well because those games didn't excite the market. So what they dropped was the second-worst-selling 3D Mario game of all time, the worst-selling Metroid game of all time, and the second-worst-selling Zelda game of all time. Gamers don't want 3D Mario. No one cares about Sakamoto's inane storytelling. And Zelda players don't want feminine, cartoony games.

Don't believe me? Look at sales numbers. New Super Mario Bros is the second best-selling Mario games of all time, and the best-selling stand-alone title. Not only that, but it clearly cost less to make than Super Mario Galaxy. Any businessman with an ounce of sense would have ordered his employees to make a sequel to the first game rather than the second. However, Miyamoto is obsessed with 3D (he's behind the 3DS, greenlit the Virtual Boy, and why there were no 2D Mario games for almost 20 years). Essentially, he is convinced that his vision is the "correct" one, and the reason the market doesn't embrace 3D Mario is people haven't been properly educated.  As a result, Mario Galaxy 2 got a blowout budget and marketing campaign, while 2D Mario didn't happen again on the Wii (and the Wii U sequel was borderline shovelware).

That brings us to the Wii U. The Wii U is the capstone on Nintendo's rejection of New Market Games. The Wii controller was designed by a team of lower-ranked Nintendo engineers to address the problem of people not playing games due to the controller being too complicated. Miyamoto's contribution was the plug for attachments, which only ever got used by one thing. It's small, simple, not too expensive, and there are fun 4-player games for it. By contrast, the Wii U controller, which is entirely Miyamoto's "genius" idea, is basically the most complicated home console controller ever devised (okay, it gets the #2 slot), it's three times more expensive than a PS4 controller, and it consumes so many system resources that there's no way to use more than two of them. It is, in essence, a reprise of his totally failed GBA-Gamecube connectivity idea. 

That is why the Wii U is failing. It's not failing because people don't understand Miyamoto's brilliant controller idea. It's failing because he's got no business acumen, doesn't understand what people want from a controller, and seized the reins from the junior employees who had turned the company around.