Nintendo's Wii-U misunderstands what made the Wii a success

Good article. Interesting thoughts.

> and that name certainly didn't help, I suspect most people didn't know it was a different console from the Wii

I've met people who even now think the Wii U is a new controller for the Wii. The "New 3DS" isn't any better. Nintendo suck at naming.

An interesting article, but there is an important point that I don't think it addresses as well as it ought to.

> Gathering people in front of a big screen in a living room to play together is an experience that smartphones can't match.

True. Wii games are something people do together. With all the ways we twist the word "social" today, it can be easy to forget that (say) Facebook is not really social in the way that two people playing Mario Kart on a Wii in the same room is. Facebook is you staring at your own screen. The same goes for many multiplayer games. The Wii is different.

But the Wii-U is not different. Everyone gets a handheld screen. Of course there is the big screen that everyone can look at, but does anyone actually do that? In the Wii-U commercials, all those excited, happy people are constantly glancing from the screen they are holding to the big screen and back. Obviously, the actors were told to do that; I doubt too many real people do it.

That changes things greatly. People playing a Wii game in the same room are together. People playing a Wii-U game in the same room are not.

Bear in mind that the majority of the Wii U's best-selling games support local co-op multiplayer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_U_vide...

But one of the major points of the article is that the Wii Remote made local multiplayer gaming enticing to casual gamers, and the Wii U Gamepad does not. That's fair. But I'm not convinced that any Wii title besides Wii Sports actually achieved the goal that the author claims to characterize the best Wii games generally. For example, the best-selling Wii game was Mario Kart 8, but my impression is that few gamers, casual or otherwise, found the motion controls appealing after the initial novelty had faded. And there's a strong sense among many Nintendo observers that while Wii Sports was a brilliant game, it was also a dead end.

They did make a more accurate "Wii Remote 2", except its called Wii Remote Plus and came out before the Wii U.