- This video is sponsored by Mevo.
Hey guys, this is Austin.
The Wii U was the biggest flop in Nintendo history.
Now sure, they had weird experiments like the Virtual Boy,
but coming off of the massively successful Wii,
there was a real sense that Nintendo could do no wrong.
And yet, we have this.
Reason number one, is a simple one.
The name was just not a good idea.
Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii U
was not a bad console, but a lot of people
first of all didn't even realize
that it was even a separate console by itself.
Lots and lots of people just thought
that it was a tablet add-on for the original Wii.
And I mean, with ads like this, can you blame them?
- [Boy] And did we mention, togetherness?
- Just check out the simulation.
- Whoa!
- Don't get me wrong, a ton of people made fun
of the name of the original Wii,
at least until it was in basically every living room
on the face of the planet.
The problem is that six years after the launch
of the original Wii, Nintendo brought this out
and a lot of people just asked,
what exactly was it?
It is a big problem, when tons of people don't realize
that your shiny brand new console,
is an actual shiny new console,
not some add-on for the original Wii.
Especially when you consider,
that after 100 million sales of the original Wii
and merely 13 million with the Wii U,
Nintendo had a major branding problem,
that honestly could have been solved
by just calling this the Wii 2, or you know, the Wii
Want You To Buy Our Console Edition.
Reason number two why the Wii U was sales challenged
had to do with the tablet that served
as it's controller, the GamePad.
Now it's easy to forget that back in 2012,
tablets were touted as the next big thing.
Unfortunately, what was not the next big thing,
was a giant unwieldy tablet that was completely useless
if it was not connected to its base station.
That's the beauty of a console like the Switch.
It has pretty much none of the same down sides
as the Wii U, so you're going to be getting
a more powerful system, that's going to be a lot smaller,
a lot more portable, and to top it all off,
you can take it with you anywhere.
As opposed to the Wii U where,
you can take this anywhere,
as long as this is no more than 20-25 feet away.
With the Wii U, the GamePad relied
on a local wireless connection.
Now while that was fine for the most part,
get too far away and it completely falls apart.
However, once you're actually close to the Wii U console
it does work pretty well.
In theory, you could never plug this into a TV,
and just use the GamePad for all of your game play.
At launch, the GamePad also had another problem.
Not very good battery life.
So the first models would last somewhere in the neighborhood
of three to three and a half hours on a charge
which really isn't great for a controller.
Thankfully later models did bump that up to something
closer to six to seven, but if you're one of those
early adopters of the Wii U, you had better not
stay too far from a charger with this guy.
Now this might sound like a little bit of a nitpick,
but one of the issues, especially with games like
Super Smash Bros., is that while
this is always gonna be one of your controllers,
you can only ever have one GamePad paired
with the Wii U at the same time.
Meaning that if everyone comes over
for a game of Smash Bros., someone's always
gonna get stuck with the giant controller.
However, don't get me wrong,
this is not all bad by any means.
So first of all, the idea that this has a lot
of interesting tech that was legitimately new
for the time is cool.
Stuff like NFC support for Amiibos,
which would come a little bit later,
really was the first time that this
was ever shown in a Nintendo console.
And the idea that you do have a camera,
you do have decent controls,
even though it's a little bit big,
a touch screen, there's a lot to like here.
But, this was a major hurdle for the Wii U to overcome
and a lot of people just straight up thought
that it was an accessory for the original Wii.
Kinda hard to get over that one.
- Hot buttered popcorn, that's a deal!
- Before we move on, I wanna
give a huge shout out to Mevo for sponsoring this video.
So what you're looking at right now
is being shot on a Mevo camera.
It's basically the next best thing to having your own Ken.
What's so cool about the Mevo,
is that it is a small pocketable 4K camera
that has full capabilities of turning itself
into a livestreaming control room.
So basically, once you pair it with the app,
you can use that to be able to pan around the shot,
do zooms, do punch ins, and all of this stuff
is going to be completely digital thanks to that 4K sensor.
What makes the Mevo unique, is that this single camera
can livestream to a variety of sources
including YouTube, Facebook, as well as Periscope.
What's cool is, because it's so small
and it does have a tripod mount in the box,
you can easily set this up on the go.
So in addition to being able to work over wifi,
you can also connect it to your phone
and use it over LTE to livestream
something like a concert, or in my case,
I can livestream a super cool match of Mario Kart.
One of my favorite parts really is how the app works.
So really simply I can say, zoom out on the shot.
I can tap on my face, I can tap on the screen,
I can sort of punch in, punch out,
there's really so many different options
to be able to kind of get a more studio quality experience
out of a camera that is really going to fit in your pocket.
So if you wanna up your livestream game,
definitely be sure to go check out the Mevo
at the link in the description,
and while you're there you can check out my coupon code
which'll get you like $50 off.
Anyway, huge shout out to Mevo for sponsoring this video.
- Here's why we need Wii U.
Reason number three has to do with power.
It's easy to forget, but the Wii U actually came out
only a year before the Xbox One and the PS4.
Where the Wii was essentially just a faster GameCube,
the Wii U did some legitimately interesting stuff.
Of course, one of biggest leaps, was the leap to HD,
something that the Xbox 360 beat it to by like seven years.
However there was more to it than just that.
As opposed to the anemic single core CPU
that was found in both the GameCube and the Wii,
instead the Wii U stepped all the way up
to a triple core PowerPC processor.
Although, this was hardly cutting edge, even back in 2012.
Nintendo also included a dual AMD GPU set up.
Well, technically at least.
So in addition to the standard GPU,
which is what the Wii U uses to run its normal games,
you're also going to be getting a copy of the Wii GPU.
Now this is for backwards compatibility,
and it does work really well here.
Although interestingly, you actually can unlock
GameCube backwards compatibility as well,
although that is definitely not going to be fully supported.
At least, if you ask Nintendo.
With two gigs of RAM, the Wii U does have
a healthy advantage over Xbox 360 as well as the PS3,
and in a lot of ways, the Wii U is
going to be more powerful.
Unfortunately, the Wii U came out in 2012,
and again, being only a year away
from both the Xbox One and PS4 meant
that this really had a difficult time competing
with the current generation of consoles.
Just like the Wii, it had a lot of interesting capabilities,
but high performance definitely wasn't one of them.
Reason number four has to do with price.
So when the Wii U first came out there were two models.
First of all, a basic white version
which looks very, very similar to the original Wii,
and then there's the black deluxe edition,
which was a little bit more expensive,
and at least didn't look quite so much
like the console that it was replacing.
(clears throat)
Considering that you were getting a console
with roughly the same power as the outgoing
Xbox 360 and PS3, prices weren't exactly cheap.
So the basic model came with only eight gigabytes
of storage for $300, and even stepping up
to the deluxe model would still only get you 32 gigs
of storage at a $350 price tag.
Now to be fair, it wasn't all bad from the start.
The first couple months of the Wii U being on sale,
Nintendo sold over three million units.
Unfortunately after that, well sales kinda fell
off of a cliff, and they really never recovered.
Due to the high cost of the GamePad which had
to be included with every single Wii U,
Nintendo really didn't have a lot of options
to be able to boost the lagging sales.
So after about a year, they were able
to drop the price on the deluxe model
from $350 to $300, which did make an effect,
but at the end of the day, there really was not a lot
of room for them to do anything besides hope that people
would finally buy this misunderstood, wonderful console.
Now if that was the only problem with the Wii U,
they probably would have been just fine.
However, with problems quickly mounting,
the Wii U having only been on sale for less than a year,
the real challengers were coming up very quickly.
PS4 and Xbox One, as you might imagine,
very quickly outsold the Wii U, and never looked back.
That brings us to reason number five,
why the Wii U was a failure.
Third party support, or more specifically
the almost complete lack thereof.
Now let's be real, the original Wii did have a lot
of third party games, the problem was,
most of them were complete garbage.
(marching music)
However, with a hundred million consoles in the wild,
a lot of developers, in fact, pretty much all developers
really didn't have a lot of choice,
you had to make a Wii game.
Now when it comes to the Wii U,
they didn't really have that constraint,
which meant that they really didn't have
to actually make Wii U games, and so, they didn't.
To be fair, there were some third party games
on the Wii U, most specifically Ubisoft
actually did support it for the first few years.
However, the issue was, is that with so few consoles
in the wild, and such a huge disparity
between the performance of the Wii U
and the brand new Xbox One and PS4,
it was very difficult for developers
to justify spending the time and money
to bring an actually decent Wii U game to the platform.
Making things more complicated
was the promise of the GamePad.
Of course, most first parties didn't take great advantage
of this, so when it comes to third party support,
yeah, that really wasn't a thing.
Now to really put things in context,
the finally tally here in the US for third party games
released on the Wii U, was a mere 118 titles.
That is far less than any other main Nintendo console.
By a lot.
Now don't get me wrong, there were some amazing
Nintendo titles for the Wii U,
but at this point, almost all of them have been ported
to the Switch, and are oftentimes
even better than their original versions.
The ones that haven't been ported
are pretty much already on the way.
It was a cool console, there was a lot they did right.
But the games either weren't there,
or are just better on Switch today anyway.
It's kind of ironic to think that the Switch
really is just a Wii U 2.0 with the tech
that actually supports the original vision.
Sometimes it just goes to show,
success and failure can be two different sides
of the same coin.
- And that's how it's done.