The Rise and Fall of the Nintendo Wii

A few posts ago, I mentioned how I correctly predicted of the Wii's fall from grace.  The question comes down to exactly why Nintendo had to do what they did, and exactly why the system failed.  With my original Wii console (I have purchased another since the time I got rid of my original one), I remember getting WarioWare Smooth Moves in February of 2007.  I remember playing it once, and disliking it.  I put the game on the shelf and put it out of my mind, as I usually had done with games I didn't like.  In the case of many games, such as Call of Duty: World At War and Resident Evil 5, I didn't care much for them at first.  However, putting them away for a while and starting it over when I was bored really made me take a liking to both of those games.  I hoped that it would be that way with all my Wii games.  However, the more I played the Wii, the more I realized I really didn't want to go back and play these games.  All of my friends at the time seemed to get insanely insulted that I would dare insult the greatness of the great and powerful Nintendo.  A few months later, many of them had ditched their Wii consoles as well.

Of course, the Wii went on to move an absolute ton of hardware.  Nintendo was the media darling, and I'm not just talking gaming media.  I'm talking mainstream media.  Thanks to the low production costs of the console, Nintendo was making bank just off of the $249.99 price point it originally released at.  Then when you factor in all the extra accessories that Nintendo attached to the thing, it was making some serious bank even before you purchased a game.  Sony and Microsoft did the opposite with the launches of their consoles.  The X-Box 360 launched at $399.99 and that was roughly cost.  Sony launched at an astonishing $599.99, and was actually losing $200 every console sold.  So Nintendo was the only company banking off of their hardware alone.  

The Wii was an odd beast though for a few different reasons.  First of all, it was a console that wasn't even in the same ballpark as far as horsepower goes as their competition.  The 360 and PS3 are clearly more powerful and it's not by any small margin.  While in the past a developer could take one build of a game and port it to all three platforms with minor difficulties, the Wii require a part all it's own just due to graphic content.  Secondly, and following that note, the Wii also required specialized controls.  It wasn't as simple as just mapping simple movements and such to a control pad, it require something completely different.  That meant something very important to developers and publishers, money.  Any time you have to do something different, it requires money to do so.  Lastly, Nintendo also seemed to abandoned their "quality above quantity" sort of business they shouted from the mountain tops since the Nintendo 64.  Arguments were raised then by media types on how Nintendo could compete with Sony when Sony's library was so diverse and robust.  Nintendo's reply was, "quality over quantity."  That, apparently, was discontinued for the Wii, as Nintendo basically allowed anything and everything under the sun on their system.

People who had been playing games their entire lives, who grew up with Nintendo saw the Big N drifting away from them.  To be fair to Nintendo, the gaming public really had it coming.  With the GameCube, Nintendo did what most consoles had done.  They brought out a console very much like their two competitors and expected gamers to make the choice when standing in the store trying to figure out which was the right one for them.  Sadly, for Nintendo, gamers pretty much shunned the console, using it as a secondary system for the Nintendo exclusive titles.  GameCube games that came out for all three consoles, such as Madden, would often sell far below the other two consoles.  So Nintendo had to do something different to gain the attention of the public again.  They decided to go after an audience that they felt was ignored in gaming, the elderly, women and children.  This, to their credit, worked out in the beginning.  People were buying Wii consoles up quicker than they could be produced, and maintained this streak for nearly 2 years after the consoles launch. 

However, while selling tons and tons of hardware and accessories, the games were not moving as well as Nintendo would have liked.  Sure, the 1st party stuff sold well, and there were some 3rd party standouts, but overall Microsoft was still far in the lead with the core gaming titles that were moving millions and millions of units on a yearly basis.  There are two real reasons, and I'm sure one of them you've heard over and over again.  No high definition graphics, right?  100% true.  Why anyone would pay 50 bucks to put a game on their 50 inch plasma screen in 480p resolution is beyond me, when you could pay 60 and get it for the more powerful units, projecting up to 1080p.  Furthermore, we come to the second and much more important reason.  The controls on the Wii, for the lack of a better term, sucked.  Gamers who were around 30 years of age, all grew up with a NES controller in our hands.  With the Wii, however, Nintendo ripped that out of our hands and proclaimed that we had to learn how to play all over again.  Or, we could buy them on X-Box, which is what most of us did.

This is very obvious when you look at the releases of hardcore gaming titles on the Wii.  Electronic Arts started firing a full spread of their best IPs at the Wii, like Madden and NCAA Football, but the results were lukewarm at best.  In fact, it only took EA one season to completely cancel any further NCAA Football games to come out on the platform due to poor performance of sales.  Why?  Because everyone was buying it for X-Box or Playstation.  The Wii, like the GameCube before it, became an afterthought in the minds of those who were in the stores on a monthly basis supporting the industry.  Sure, Nintendo would peel off a Mario game and sell a few million units, or Ubisoft would find a dancing crazy with Just Dance, but overall the games that were selling 15 million units a year, like Call of Duty, were seeing less than 1% penetration on the Wii.  In fact, Madden NFL 2011 actually sold better on the 10 plus year old dead Playstation 2 console than it did on the top selling current generation console in the world.  I can only imagine how embarrassing that must have been for them.

The truth is that you cannot afford to move completely away from the hardcore gaming audience and expect to still sell games.  Furthermore, you can't live just for Christmas and expect to survive the other 10 months out of the year.  Nintendo tried to something different, because they needed to make a bold move.  There's nothing wrong with that.  However, if Nintendo had openly supported the use of traditional game play controls for those of us who were raised to play games the way Nintendo taught us, I am sure the system would be a very healthy alternative to their competitors.  It does work too, the Wii version of Punchout gave you a choice.  You can play it with motion controls, or  you can turn the controller sideways and play it old school.  Guess what?  Easily one of the top games on the system.  No question at all.  

The flip side is Microsoft's pimping of the Kinect to hardcore gamers.  While the curiosity was originally there just to see what the sucker could do, I don't believe for one second that the inclusion of Kinect support has made any hardcore games, like Mass Effect 3 or Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier, sell any better.  Nor do I think those titles moved many units of Kinect hardware either.  There has to be a happy medium between hardcore titles and the more casual motion controls.  There's nothing wrong with Kinect Sports or Wii Sports, they are a lot of fun, but I don't believe that those games alone can support a console.