Desperate Times for Wii U as Sales Plummet

For me, the Wii U is a strange being. I neither really desperately need it in my life nor can i firmly decide that i shouldn't buy one. The reviews aren't great. The entire Wii brand in general hasn't received much critical success, being overshadowed by its younger and flashier predecessors, the Wii is like the chubby kid in the playground with his finger stuck up his nose - cute for all of 5 minutes but then boring and kind of sticky. I have always been a heavily, slightly creepily, loyal fan of Nintendo but there comes a point in every fandom when you realise that your long esteemed heroes are, in fact, not super-human. They have weaknesses and they make mistakes. Bringing the Wii U out as a separate console was a mistake.

So, as Wii U prices plummet and Asda gives up trying to stock it all let's take a look at why the most recent offspring of the Nintendo world perhaps isn't living up to its parents' expectations. The Wii U has failed because of the 3 areas it would have to succeed in to be any kind of contender in today's rapidly evolving technology market.

Console 
The console hardware itself is not up to scratch. The single touch controls are practically prehistoric when compared with Apple's daily dual touch releases and this gives the whole gaming experience a fairly heavy, clunky feeling which is reflected in the actual feel of the console and its slow, small internal hardrive. There's a camera on the front of the handheld though... great. We can take a low quality photo of ourselves using this instead of the HD high resolution camera that all devices come loaded with now, double chins an' all.

Marketing 
The Wii U was a marketing flop. Strangely constructed adverts and a bizarrely quiet run up to its release left consumers baffled over what the actual piece of plastic was. It took real research to find out about this console before its release, research which casual gamers wouldn't have bothered to complete and more importantly shouldn't have bothered to complete in this day and age when information is at its most available. Many consumers ended up believing that the handheld was just an add-on for the existing Wii that every family had in their home. It's no surprise then, that its sales have been abysmally low, superseded by the PS Vita within months.

3rd Party Support
No-one can do it on their own, which is why Nintendo's lack of 3rd party support is the final nail in the heavy coffin of the Wii U. It began with the ludicrous lack of new content available, Nintendo re-released ports from PS3 and X-box during the Wii U's release. Sales suffer from Nintendo's inability to attract and maintain 3rd party content and both developer and consumer are stuck in a spiral of publishers and sales figures. The Wii U isn't selling because there isn't enough 3rd party content, yet in a Catch 22 situation, 3rd party publishers are worried about these sales figures and therefore not bothering to develop for the dying console. You would think then, that Nintendo would happily accept the faith of a developer however small in bringing the Wii U back from the dead but no, they turned their backs on Japanese indie developers... interesting move Nintendo... interesting move...

It's sorely disappointing that Nintendo couldn't pull it out the bag for the Wii U. Miyamoto complains that there wasn't enough hardware development time which hindered the development of content as well which would suggest reason behind the Wii U's continuing failure. Whatever the cause, the console just isn't flashy enough to survive in the evolving digital technology market and will always be the little chubby kid in the playground. Hopefully that chubby kid will grow up to be respected for his chubbiness, in the same way the Wii U may just be valued for its simplicity and virtual console capabilities but who knows.