Wii U is a failure... will its fate be like the Dreamcast?

[Alpha 35]

Seems like the Wii U has completely died after the Holiday's.

 

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/wii-u-has-historically-bad-january-sells-about-50000-units-in-us/

 

Nintendo has better get its shit together. People are already comparing the Wii U's fate to that of the Dreamcast. I was at a local game store the other day and they said they haven't sold a single Wii U in weeks. Thoughts?

[gamez fan 14]

Nintendo has better get its shit together. People are already comparing the Wii U's fate to that of the Dreamcast. I was at a local game store the other day and they said they haven't sold a single Wii U in weeks. Thoughts?

It's over Nintendo should just focus on making the great games their famous for and release em Multi format anyone for Mario720

[Skythe 18]

I'm pretty sure the same people complaining are the same ones that said Resident Evil on Gamecube was gonna be a kids game.

[Hard Core Rikki 8]

Input methods are a mess. The giant tablet controller sends a wrong message and contributes to a pricing unnecessarily higher than necessary.

 

Unless they heavily push backward compatibility with Wii games and tie game ownership to accounts rather than consoles, their existing audience just has no incentive to pick a WiiU instead of a Wii with a huge library.

I mean, anyone looking for hardcore games likely plays them on PC or their Xbox/PS3, so having such titles as exclusives wouldnt help much.

[Alpha 35]

Input methods are a mess. The giant tablet controller sends a wrong message and contributes to a pricing unnecessarily higher than necessary.

 

Unless they heavily push backward compatibility with Wii games and tie game ownership to accounts rather than consoles, their existing audience just has no incentive to pick a WiiU instead of a Wii with a huge library.

I mean, anyone looking for hardcore games likely plays them on PC or their Xbox/PS3, so having such titles as exclusives wouldnt help much.

That controller with the screen is probably the coolest thing about the system. But if it is that glitchy (and pricey!), that's sad to read. The lack of great games for the Wii is what made that console gather dust IMO. If they're already doing that with the Wii U at its infancy, then you may as well just stop production. It's pathetic that Nintendo's team is always a few steps behind Sony and Microsoft.

 

BTW, slightly off topic, but any news on a Wii U emulator? I wouldn't be surprised if we see one sooner than we think.

[emsley 28]

I'm a hardcore Nintendo head.

All of my greatest gaming memories are from the old N.

The wii failed at every point to suck me in and buy a unit.

Only now that you can get Wii's for 20 quid and there are about 3 games I want to play (not including zelda skyward sword, my buddy played it and said he was so disappointed)

Mario galaxy is still the only reason I'd try it.

 

But yeah I know you are on about the Wii U.

It's time nintendo went back to doing what they do best, personally I feel nintendo heads have been crapped on for quite a few years.

[Hard Core Rikki 8]

BTW, slightly off topic, but any news on a Wii U emulator? I wouldn't be surprised if we see one sooner than we think.

I dont think one should be expected this soon. For all purposes, the WiiU processor is mostly a more powerful multicore Wii one with larger caches. Nintendo has always been conservative with its hardware, which greatly helped production of emus increasingly earlier (like for Wii emulation, perfected during the useful life of the console).

 

Consoles whose games can require firmware upgrades are a moving target compared to previous-gen, fixed-firmware ones.

IMO, emulation for the next gen will be marked by increasing reliance on virtualization rather than emulation. Makes sense when one thinks about it (its easier to maintain virtualized target hardware than go lowlevel - like how Virtualbox emulates only about 3-4 network cards, but any computer can run VB fine with the only hit being variable performance).

Edited March 23, 2013 by Hard Core Rikki

[Alpha 35]

IMO, emulation for the next gen will be marked by increasing reliance on virtualization rather than emulation. Makes sense when one thinks about it (its easier to maintain virtualized target hardware than go lowlevel - like how Virtualbox emulates only about 3-4 network cards, but any computer can run VB fine with the only hit being variable performance).

If that's the case, it sounds fantastic. I'm really digging the amount of virtualization programmers are implementing in today's software. IMO, sounds like the games will perform a lot better on virtualization rather than emulation. Specifically due to the fact that emulation sometimes is unable to 100% reproduce a game correctly. There have been some notable examples of this with SNES emulation.

 

From a security standpoint, sandboxing is one of those features that has really used virtualization to new levels we haven't been seen before.