Wii U

• 1. Introduction

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  The Wii U arrived in late 2012 carrying a promise that Nintendo desperately needed to keep. After the runaway success of the Wii, the company had come to be seen as a maker of toys for casual players, and the people at Nintendo knew it. Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto acknowledged openly that the lack of high-definition graphics had placed the Wii in a separate class from its rivals, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The new console was meant to fix all of that. It would be the first eighth-generation console. It would finally support HD. It would have a controller unlike anything the world had seen. And it would win back the hardcore gamers Nintendo feared it had lost.

  What followed was one of the most instructive commercial failures in the history of video games. The Wii U sold just 13.56 million units over its lifetime, making it Nintendo's worst-selling home console ever. Yet it introduced ideas that its successor, the Nintendo Switch, would refine and turn into a worldwide phenomenon. The story of the Wii U is really two stories at once: a story of what went wrong, and a story of what turned out to be right all along.

• 2. The Concept Takes Shape

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  Nintendo first conceived of the Wii U in 2008, when the Wii was still riding its peak popularity. The concern was not about sales figures but about perception. The public had come to see the Wii as a machine for casual players, and that reputation was proving sticky. Nintendo wanted a console that could bring core gamers back into the fold.

  The project that eventually became the Wii U started over from scratch on several occasions. Ideas about which direction to take sparked debate inside the company, and no single vision emerged easily. One of the most distinctive features of the final design, the touchscreen embedded in the controller, began as something far more modest. Miyamoto and his team originally wanted a small screen that could display game feedback and status messages, similar in spirit to the VMU accessory that Sega had included with the Dreamcast. The inspiration for even that humble idea came from an unexpected place: the blue light on the Wii's disc slot that lit up to signal new messages. The concept of a full screen capable of displaying an entire game came later, and it had been considered but ruled out as financially unworkable until the technology costs fell enough to make it viable.

  In October 2009, Miyamoto said publicly that Nintendo had no concrete plans for its next console but expected it to continue featuring motion controls and to have an interface that was more compact and cheaper. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata floated the idea of 3D compatibility but tied it to a condition: adoption of 3D televisions would need to reach at least 30% before that made sense. In early 2010, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé declared that a Wii successor would not be coming any time soon.

• 3. Announcement and Confusion

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  On the 25th of April 2011, Nintendo issued an official statement confirming a Wii successor would arrive during 2012, and that playable units would be on the floor at E3 2011. At an investor conference, Iwata promised it would "offer something new for home game systems." Months of rumors had preceded the announcement, many of them centered on a project called "Project Cafe," and some reports correctly guessed a tablet-like controller with a touchscreen while others thought the controller would resemble the GameCube's.

  Project Cafe was unveiled at Nintendo's E3 2011 press conference by Fils-Aimé under its official name, the Wii U. Fils-Aimé described it as "a system we will all enjoy together, but also one that's tailor-made for you." The reception was complicated. In the two days after the unveiling, Nintendo's stock fell nearly 10%, dropping to levels not seen since 2006. Analysts questioned whether the touchscreen would be affordable or sufficiently innovative compared to the original Wii Remote.

  The confusion that would haunt the console's entire commercial life began almost immediately. Nintendo's own Senior Product Marketing Manager, Bill Trinen, admitted in an interview the day after launch dates were announced that the company's pre-launch marketing had focused so heavily on the GamePad that some consumers mistook it for an accessory to the original Wii rather than a component of an entirely new system. Trinen promised that future promotional materials, including packaging, would make both the console and the GamePad equally visible. It was a promise Nintendo struggled to fulfill.

• 4. The GamePad's Dual Identity

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  At the center of everything was the Wii U GamePad, and its 6.2-inch resistive touchscreen. Nintendo described the design philosophy behind it as "asymmetric gaming": in multiplayer, the player holding the GamePad could have an entirely different objective and experience from everyone else in the room. The screen's contents were rendered on the console itself and then streamed wirelessly to the controller.

  The GamePad supported near field communications, which allowed specially designed figurines and cards, including Nintendo's Amiibo line, to interact with games by being placed on the controller. In Japan, it could also handle contactless payments from the eShop using Suica cards. The GamePad's most celebrated capability was Off-TV Play: the ability to continue a game on the controller's screen without using the television at all, transferring the entire experience to the handheld display.

  The hardware underneath that screen became a consistent sore point. The GamePad's standard 1500mAh battery provided only about 3.5 hours of gameplay before needing a charge, and reviews singled this out immediately. Nintendo released an improved 2550mAh battery pack in July 2013 that extended use to between five and eight hours. The Pro Controller, released alongside the console, was positioned as the option for players who wanted a more traditional design, and it carried a claimed 80-hour battery life. Both the GamePad and the Pro Controller were incompatible with Wii games, which still required Wii controllers through the console's dedicated backward-compatibility mode.

• 5. Sales and Third-Party Collapse

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  The Wii U launched in North America on the 18th of November 2012 at US$299.99 for the Basic Set and US$349.99 for the Deluxe Set. Nintendo sold its entire allotment of more than 400,000 units in the first week and moved a total of 425,000 units through November. In Japan, over 600,000 units sold in December 2012 alone. From launch through the end of 2012, Nintendo reported 3.06 million consoles and 11.69 million software units shipped worldwide.

  Then the momentum collapsed. In January 2013, Nintendo sold 57,000 Wii U units in the United States. For comparison, the original Wii had sold 435,000 units in January 2007, also two months after its own launch. Nintendo cut its fiscal year 2013 sales projection by 17%, from 5.5 million to 4 million, and the system still fell short, ending at 3.5 million units. From March to June 2013, approximately 160,000 units sold, a drop of 51% from the prior quarter.

  Third-party publishers read the numbers and reacted swiftly. Electronic Arts announced in May 2013 that it was reducing Wii U support and had no games in development, though its CFO partially walked this back days later, saying the company was building titles for Nintendo's platform but far fewer than for PlayStation or Xbox. Ubisoft said at E3 2013 that it would make no more Wii U exclusives until sales improved. Bethesda Softworks VP Pete Hines explained the company's absence by pointing to hardware alignment concerns, though the explanation was later refined to being largely about the hardware itself. Asda, the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, confirmed it had no plans to stock the console at all, though it would carry games on a title-by-title basis.

• 6. First-Party Games as Lifeline

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  Mario Kart 8, released in 2014, demonstrated that Nintendo's own software remained capable of moving hardware even when everything else was working against the system. In the United Kingdom, Wii U console sales rose 666% in the week of Mario Kart 8's release, with the Mario Kart 8 bundle accounting for 82% of all Wii U console sales in the region that week. Compared to June 2013, Wii U software sales in the United States were up 373% in June 2014 and console sales were up 233%.

  Super Smash Bros. for Wii U broke records of its own in November 2014, selling 490,000 copies in the United States in its first three days. Nintendo credited the system's software growth in the price-cut period to key releases including Pikmin 3 and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. Following the Wind Waker HD bundle's release on the 20th of September 2013, Wii U sales in North America rose 200% over August. From July to September 2013, approximately 300,000 units sold, up 87% from the prior three months.

  Head of 3rd Party Marketing and Communications Damon Baker described the fan base in August 2015 as small but "really loyal and passionate" toward Nintendo-developed content, one that actively checked the eShop for new releases. By late July 2016, only 39 first-party and 118 third-party Wii U games had been physically released in the United States, the lowest counts of any Nintendo home console. The highest-selling game across the system's lifetime was Mario Kart 8 at 8.46 million units, followed by Super Mario 3D World at 5.88 million and New Super Mario Bros. U at 5.82 million. Total software sales reached 103.53 million units, with ten games surpassing the one-million mark.

• 7. Discontinuation and What Came Next

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  Nintendo formally announced the end of Wii U production on the 31st of January 2017. The eShop remained open for purchases until the 27th of March 2023. Online functionality ran until the 9th of April 2024, when servers shut down at 02:00 UTC.

  In a shareholders report in July 2016, Kimishima and Miyamoto acknowledged that they had expected the Wii U to sell one hundred million units, comparable to the Wii's success. With roughly thirteen million sold, the gap was severe. In a January 2017 interview with Time Magazine, Fils-Aimé called the Wii U "a necessary step, in order to get to Nintendo Switch" and compared it to the GameCube, a console also remembered fondly despite modest sales.

  Fils-Aimé said the commercial failure of the Wii U, specifically the unclear function of the GamePad and the thin third-party library, directly shaped how Nintendo designed the Switch's marketing. The goal was to make "crystal clear what the proposition is." The Nintendo Switch was officially announced on the 20th of October 2016 as a tablet-like hybrid console with detachable controllers and a docking station for TV play. Nintendo positioned it as a home gaming system first. Most of the Wii U's popular exclusive games were eventually ported to the Switch, giving the titles a far larger audience. Breath of the Wild, announced as Fils-Aimé's final confirmed first-party Wii U game in mid-January 2017, shipped simultaneously on both platforms at the Switch's launch.