TBH I don't understand the Wii-U. It's a hand-held Wii?

They should have been supporting the Wii this whole time and lowering prices on games allowing for a massive affordable library - Especially considering the economic recession that kicked up some time ago.

Valve made it's fortune by trying to attract more with low prices rather than sell to just a niche few for large prices.
Nintendo would've had that same advantage had they not ran off on their Wii-U tangent.

Didn't the Wii-U also distract focus from their Nintendo 3DS at the same time?

This is similar to what killed Sega: Too many different consoles all at once instead of just placing on focus on and perfecting one.

It is difficult to justify buying a console just for the occasional first-party title--many of Nintendo's main series still don't have Wii U entries.

The Wii U is Nintendo's next console and is separate from the Wii. There is still a main console unit; the tablet is just the controller. It's also not exactly a portable solution even around the house since many games don't support playing solely on the tablet screen.

Wii games and controllers work with the Wii U, so in that sense it can also double as a Wii replacement/upgrade, but that is not its primary purpose.

Right, because the Wii version of Twilight Princess shows that was a good idea. -_-;

Also argh, learn to paragraph!

Oh, c'mon, the Wii U's library right now is much better than the Xbox One and the PS4 both in quantity and quality. Of course, the Wii U was released 1 year before the Xbox One and the PS4, so it's no surprise it has a better library right now.

And to be honest the Wii U's launch line-up was still better than the PS4/Xbox One in my opinion (even though it was still pretty weak). I mean, pretty much all the Xbox One/PS4 launch games were kind of disappointing and got some pretty mediocre reviews (Ryse, Knack, Killzone, Dead Rising 3). At least New Super Mario Bros Wii U didn't disappoint and Zombi U was kind of decent.

I really don't know what you mean when you say that "Nintendo is intentionally releasing games on the Wii and not the Wii U". Am i missing something? Nintendo hasn't released anything for the Wii since they announced the Wii U. The last game Nintendo made for the Wii was Skyward Swords, which came ONE YEAR before the Wii U.

I agree that the Wii U is not doing well at all. But calling it a "dead console"? Heck, no. The Xbox One is also struggling in sales right now and no one is calling it a "dead console".

Since when does Nintendo have a strong third-party support? The last Nintendo console with strong third-party support was the SNES decades ago. If you buy a Nintendo console expecting a huge third-party line-up then you really don't know what you're doing. It has nothing to do with the Wii U. The Wii was the biggest selling console of the last generation and it didn't have a strong third-party support.

What exactly is Nintendo releasing for the Wii? I think i may have missed it.
Exactly.

Why, what was wrong with the Wii version?

I have to agree with you on the eShop. It's pretty damn hard to navigate and find stuff you want. About the games not being "exclusive", well, i don't know about Monster Hunter, but the 3DS and Wii U versions of Sonic Lost Worlds are completely different games. The 3DS version is not a port, it's a new game. Even the developer is different, the 3DS version was made my DIMPS, the Wii U version was made by Sonic Team if i recall correctly.

The Wii U library is not as good as it should have been, but calling it "very barren" is kind of an exaggeration in my opinion.

I think that it was just the same thing as the GC version and didn't use the full potential of the Wii's motion controls like Skyward Swords did.

Well, Skyward Sword was using the motion plus and there was no motion plus when the Wii was first released. And it was a good move for Nintendo, because the Wii version of Twilight Princess sold about 6 millions (alongside the 1+ million on the Gamecube).

At least the 3DS is doing okay with its games. A Link Between Worlds is a bestseller, and a damn fine game as well if i do say so myself.

And I do sort of want a Wii U for Hyrule Warriors.

Which is why their consoles, outside the Wii, tend to sell worse than the others since the SNES. However they still sell well enough for Nintendo's purposes. The WiiU is selling much, much worse because no Nintendo games on it have brought in that usual Nintendo audience.

Whether future games they release do or not I cannot say.

Uh? But they don't have "many different consoles all at once". They just have one console (the Wii U) and one portable (the 3DS). Same thing as Sony.

It was a rush job. The controls were half baked and they mirrored everything to make Link right handed (the correct way to do this would have been to actually redo whichever bits of animation would have been affected instead of reversing the entire game). It achieved what they wanted, which was sell lots of copies (and lots of Wiis), but it's by far the inferior version of the game.
In terms of controls, Skyward Sword achieved what the Wii version of Twilight Princess failed at. If SS had been rushed onto the Wii U and had touchscreen controls shoehorned in it would have almost certainly been inferior.
I guess he's implying that they're trying to continue support for the Wii? But as far as I know they're not.

That's debatable... How much RAM does the PS3 have again, something like 500MB? And there's still recent releases for it, and more coming in the near future. So I'd say, theoretically a whole lot is possible with 2GB of RAM.

( And yes, I know the PS3 or 360 versions are technically inferior to the current PC or next-gen releases, but that's besides the point. Of course no one would expect a Wii U game to look exactly as good as i.e. a PS4 version of the same game. Just saying they could still create ports of most recent releases for the Wii U. )

As for your example games, I can say out of those TW3 is the only one I'm personally interested in, and I'd rather get it for PC. So I'm not sure how relevant games like that even are for Nintendo and their audience.

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I suppose you're right - There's a six year gap. Perhaps that it's marketed over here along side the 3DS and Wii that got me confused.

I still think they should've just stopped on the Wii and continued building on that for awhile allowing themselves to become the second option, aside from digital-download on PC, for budgeted gaming.

I specifically said next-gen-only; cross-gen games will all but disappear within a couple of years with the usual exception of sports games and the like.

Nintendo can't grow their audience if they don't have the multi-platform games that are available elsewhere. Their existing player base won't exist forever.

As a proud Wii U owner who skipped the Wii almost entirely, I would like to think it will experience a resurgence of sorts, but even I can't be that optimistic...

I like my Wii U, but things look rather grim. I don't see myself as any kind of fanboy, but the closest thing I would come to being one was to be a Nintendo fanboy. I have all their home consoles since the NES (so... I guess, every single one of them), an original Game Boy, a Game Boy Advance SP and a Nintendo 3DS, each of them with loads of games. I like the experience Nintendo still provides me, that no other console or PC developer can, and I don't regret getting my Premium Wii U day one. I have very few games on it, but I love the ones I do own.

Having said that, Nintendo seems to have lost touch with reality a long time ago, and I think the Wii U is going to be worse for them than the GameCube was. They desperately need to learn how to operate and cope with the needs of a digital age, they need to lose their fear of the online and understand, once and for all, that trying to please and win back their "NES/SNES-hardcore" fans -- something they claimed they were trying to do with the Wii U, prior to launch -- means stop playing it safe and being so goddamned family-obsessed (with an actual conservative, mystified and old vision of what "family" gaming means) and start taking chances outside the scope of that stereotype they created for themselves. This has been said to exhaustion, but they need to come up with new franchises and titles, Super Mario 3D World is the best platformer of this generation, by far, but gamers -- especially gamers that recently "matured" and are young adults having started their gaming life with the PSX or the PS2 -- don't care about Mario anymore. They make the best games around, but their PR has been a mess for years on end, now, and they can only reinvent their franchises so much before they become stale. Iwata keeps pushing decent-but-forgettable Kirby games, because it's his baby, they keep relying way too much on the Mario-Zelda-Metroid cornerstones and, even worse, they keep releasing remakes of those games instead of new franchise iterations.

If it wasn't for the 3DS being alive and well, Nintendo wouldn't hold up with the Wii U alone. They're practically on 3DS life-support, right now, and they had better start thinking up some strategies for their next generation of home consoles, because I honestly don't want to lose Nintendo from the hardware market. The day that happens will be a very sad day for the video game industry, even if people don't like or respect them as much as we once did. I'm not hoping for the Wii U to get a second breath of life, third-party developers pretty much all quit making games for the console, and indies would be selling better if only Nintendo had a more wise approach to online/digital. They're sitting on loads of money, but money eventually runs out if you don't make more profit, and the Wii U definitely scared them; let's just hope they learn from their mistakes, let this console die peacefully and charge full force in the next generation of machines.