By now, it should be no secret that the Nintendo Wii U was a flop from a commercial perspective. As opposed to the PlayStation 4, which is currently dominating the console market, or the Xbox One, which is doing perfectly fine in its own right, the Wii U is far behind, selling an abysmal 12.5 million units since it debuted in 2012.
This is the current reality of the Wii U, but, as it turns out, Nintendo's expectations for its current console were quite lofty — nearly 10 times that, in fact.
In Nintendo's latest investor Q&A, addressing a question regarding Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima's reported pre-launch skepticism of the Wii U, Kimishima himself revealed that Nintendo initially hoped the console would sell 100 million units worldwide.
In retrospect, this expectation was insane, because we already know how things turned out for the Wii U. The console had minimal third-party support, and its "best" games could be counted on your hands. Even worse, many of those games were first-party ones whose success was a foregone conclusion — did anyone honestly expect Mario Kart 8 or Super Smash Bros. to not sell well?
Sure, there were some surprises like Bayonetta 2, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Splatoon, but those were far and few between a veritable sea of forgettable entries and inferior ports.
However, even without looking in retrospect, Nintendo's expectation made no sense. From the get-go, it seemed Nintendo set itself up for failure because of why it expected the Wii U to sell so well in the first place.
"In an internal sales representative meeting, someone projected that we would sell close to 100 million Wii U systems worldwide," explained the Nintendo chief. "The thinking was that because Wii sold well, Wii U would follow suit. I said that, since the Wii had already sold so well, we need to clearly explain the attraction of the Wii U if we are to get beyond that and sell the new system."
Yes, you read that correctly. Quite literally, Nintendo expected the Wii U to sell well because its predecessor, the Wii, sold well. From that alone, it's clear Nintendo wasn't fully aware about why the Wii was so successful in the first place.
The Wii was a breath of fresh air within a market that was inundated with consistently stale and predictable offerings from Sony and Microsoft. With Wii Sports, it captivated the family and casual crowd that had been untapped by competitors, and with the Wii Remote, it made games with previously untapped potential reach new heights, like Resident Evil 4. Heck, even new titles like No More Heroes became a smash success, and part of that can be owed to the Wii Remote.
On the other hand, the Wii U did none of that. The family and casual crowd, which the Wii captured so effortlessly, didn't necessarily have brand loyalty to Nintendo, and the Wii U didn't offer anything that would give them any incentive to upgrade.
Similarly, whereas the Wii Remote was an awesome controller, the Wii U Game Pad was too inconsistent in the way it was handled to be overly memorable. Sure, there are instances like with Hyrule Warriors, where the Game Pad enhanced the gameplay experience, but then, there are instances like with Star Fox Zero that greatly diminished it.
Not to mention, there was the infamous Day 1 patch that forced buyers to sit around for hours before they could access most of their new console's many features.
In Nintendo's defense, it wasn't wrong to expect strong sales because of the success of its predecessor, but the issue is that it believed this would be the case through that one virtue without understanding why. The Wii targeted an audience that was left untapped at the time, but the Wii U made no such attempt to do so and didn't offer enough to convince its newly-acquired audience to upgrade.
What's done is done, however, and while the Wii U will go down as one of the most disappointing consoles — from a commercial standpoint — in history, the same doesn't have to be said about the Nintendo's next console, the NX. Of course, until Nintendo actually reveals concrete information about the NX, nothing can be said for certain.
