Here at Nintendo Fire, we’re big fans of the Wii U. There have been many excellent games released for the system, but for some reason, it has never managed to take off the way the Wii did. We speculated about reasons for this in previous posts throughout the years, but one of the most immediately apparent reasons for the Wii U’s failure—let’s just call it what it is—is the lack of proper communication regarding the console, its features, and what made it stand out from its predecessor.
The message from Nintendo was a hot mess right from the start, which is something that Nintendo of America’s president, Reggie Fils-Aime, has come straight out to admit during a recent interview with [a]list
Many thought Nintendo was in dire straits after GameCube failed to find an audience, and then Wii exploded. Are there lessons learned from Wii U that are being applied to NX?
Every time we launch a new platform, every time we launch a critical new game, we always learn. We always do our breakdown of what worked, what didn’t, and certainly we’ve done that with Wii U, and we continue to believe that the innovation of the second screen was a worthwhile concept. The games that we’ve launched on the Wii U are hugely compelling: Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, Smash Bros., Bayonetta 2, the Super Mario game, The Legend of Zelda. Arguably, if you line up all of the single platform games for Wii U and the other two platforms, we have by far the most unique games that are highly rated by consumers and highly rated by the media. So those things worked.
One of the things that we have to do better when we launch the NX—we have to do a better job communicating the positioning for the product. We have to do a better job helping people to understand its uniqueness and what that means for the game playing experience. And we have to do a better job from a software planning standpoint to have that continuous beat of great new games that are motivating more and more people to pick up the hardware and more and more people to pick up the software. Those are the critical lessons. And as I verbalize them, they’re really traditional lessons within the industry. You have to make sure people understand the concept, you have to make sure you’ve got a great library of games, and when you do that, you tend to do well.
We highly recommend you pop over to read the interview in its entirety, as Reggie also had a lot to say on topics like the company’s partnership with Universal Studios and mobile gaming!