What is the Wii U's position after the conference last night?

Apparently Nintendo won't be holding the usual press conference at E3.

 

What? Are they closing up shop now or something?

(Yeah, that's right, folks. You heard it here on B3D first: Nintendo going out of business. Evidence: no E3 press conference! )

 

^^^
Every news site is talking about it.
I am not kidding you.

 

Sounds like they're basically doing a closed door presentation for retailers and a hands on demo event for press. No public event where they run through their lineup/announcements on stage. They're claiming they'd rather communicate directly with their customers using things like Nintendo Direct, but while that may be fine for the 3 million super-fans who already bought a WiiU, it's not exactly a sound strategy for reaching anyone else.

 

May be they figured whatever they show will be overshadowed by the next PS and Xbox. May as well save some money from a big conference.

It may also have something to do with Iwata trying to take more control of what to show in US while he mostly work in Japan. It's easier for him to control how to do Nintendo Direct compared with a traditional E3 conference.

IMO, an E3 conference has much greater reach than Nintendo Direct outside people who are their fans.

Their response to adversity seems to be to centralize more power on Iwata. They think Wii U's historic performance in US is a failure of marketing done by NOA and not rooted in the hardware decisions made by people including Iwata? May be the board is giving Iwata a chance to redeem himself.

 

It's a strange and bizarre move for sure. Not unlike what I would have expected from nintendo while still under Yamaushi. E3 is THE event of the year, to skip the press conference is to outright admit they have nothing to show, nothing to trumpet to the world. It's to admit defeat before the fight even begun.

 

Playing devil's advocate here, the explanation is that consumers (those watching E3) don't want to see boring sales projections and marketing snore, which is what Nintendo and Sony have often shown at E3. Of course, they could just change the format of their showing and keep it consumer friendly, and then take the commercial stuff behind closed doors. So I guess even as devil's advocate on Nintendo's side, I'm saying they're running scared!

 

The last time Sony really did sales numbers at E3 was when they used a Little Big Planet level for all the graphs and stats. That was like 5 years ago.

E3 is the best place to get the attention of the mainstream media. The Today Show isn't going to do a segment when Nintendo streams another Nintendo direct, but they do E3 coverage each year, along with every other news or infotainment program in the world. Maybe they feel like they'll just be lost in the PS4/Durango hurricane, but throwing in the towel on the show doesn't exactly bode well for the WiiU's first party lineup going forward.

 

Are we at the point where we need to start asking "What did Dreamcast do?" for WiiU developments?

 

The new system update for the Wii U seems to be a big improvement, load-times wise. And Lego City seems to be a pretty good game.

I'm still interested in this device for my (nearly) 5yo, but it's still way too expensive just for that, I feel. Just the basic version with a tiny amount of internal memory plus Lego City is 370 euro here.

 

Get a Galaxy Note 10.1. It's digital paper with the stylus and the most natural and intuitive computing device yet made IMHO. If Nintendo gave up hardware and released on Android, it'd be perfect. Layton, Pokemon, Crazy Wario cookshop, all with stylus support on a very functional, portable device. Leave MS and Sony (and Apple, Ouya, whoever else) to duke out the TV game space. Release Lego City cross-platform and Nintendo would make loads more money from it than keeping it exclusive to a tiddly hardware base. (Was Lego City a Nintendo commission, or did they just snap up the rights?)

 

You can get the Wii U basic white version for 245e over here, but I don't think they are still selling too many. One major chain has been selling White 4GB 360s for 99€ and now they have black 360 4GB with Kinect + 2 games for 149€

 

So, lets hear from you how you would expect them to go from here, worthy notes. They made a profit, however small it was, they actually didn't lose large amounts of their 10 BILLION cash reserve.
They are still selling handheld gaming devices in a time where everyone is claiming the future is games for phones and tablets.

As i see it, when there are more games to be bought, they will lower the price of the console and let the price reflect it's position vs PS4/720. Suddenly you will have a U priced cheaper than PS4/720 and with lots of well known franchise games that every gamer with respect for themselves would want to play. In a few years Nintendo should be able to produce a WII U follow up with spiced up hardware if they feel the need for 3rd party games or faster hardware.

If Nintendo actually wanted to release games for other platforms they could have released simple remix versions of some of their old games. They didn't even want to do that, so i very much doubt that we will see them go the way of Sega and only release software.

As i have said before, the U is the WII of this generation, weak hardware but all Nintendo. I am looking forward to them lowering the price so i can get one

 

Nintendo's first party titles are still niche - they won't win 10s of millions of core gamers by their first party line-up. And in 3rd party terms, gamers will get the same games on PS360 for cheaper, or for better (or more likely, actually available) on PS4. Nintendo have backed themselves into a corner in the console space by positioning their device between two generations, but without a massive public draw of waggle. Games alone aren't going to cut it IMO, any more than they did with Gamecube which was at least a cutting-edge console and not 5 years out of date in performance. Had Gamecube released 5 years after PS2 with about the same performance, do you think it'd have gone on to sell significant numbers?

Looking ahead, it's hard to see where Nintendo can go. They don't seem happy to go with a powerful, core gamer machine, preferring to try something different. This means 3rd parties are likely to remain away. Heck, they have stayed away from Nintendo for a while now such that there's little reason to get back involved with Ninty's machines when Sony and MS offer easier and more predictable markets to target and work with. So unless Nintendo can pull another Wii out of the bag, where do they go. Having 10 billion in cash to spend on a venture is no good if you can't turn that venture into a successful product, and it's looking like the only option for Nintendo is a new, super-power core gaming machine, a PC in a case with no fancy hardware as there's no great fancy hardware to exploit now, at which point they can't differentiate. Software and services? Been pretty hit and miss on Nintendo in that regard. Maybe they'll go VR/AR next gen?

 

Nintendo may be "done" in some ways in regards to participating in the big 3 race, and relegated to a being a Mario/Zelda/Metroid niche party game platform going forward. They themselves might feel this too. Wii was already the beginning of this, but that was just a dead cat bounce so to speak.

They're waaay behind in 3rd party support and online infrastructure to even compete in a traditional way at all at this point. They need to dip into that $10 bil war chest to include a revolutionary accessory into their next box if they want to remain a home console hardware vendor. They're probably not going to figure it out though. Not sure if it's even worth the time and risk imo. They just need somewhere to push their 1st party software, aka become 3rd party publisher. Should stay with the handheld hardware though, since they've got the market cornered there.

 

Anyone have a good idea how much of the BOM is the tablet? Personally, I think it's a mistake. Besides off-TV play, they haven't demonstrated any value in having such a large and obtuse controller. And having the Wii U look like a rounded off Wii was another mistake (when many in the public think every smartphone is an iPhone, it just leads to self-shaking head syndrome).

Then again, if the console had launched with a Smash game in the first 6 months, none of this would have mattered. Was Kid Icarus really so important to Masahiro Sakuri? It's not as if the 3DS isn't able to carry itself now.

 

Why? do they have to sell 100 million consoles to stay in the game? How much do they really need to sell in order to survive. In some way the WII was a weird Nintendo hit, it's not like the other consoles, N64/GC dominated anything to the extent the WII did, they sold solid and made Nintendo a good sum, but again, it's not like the N64 was the goto machine for publishers, and afaik the GC, even though it was more close to the PS2/XBOX in performance, did not exactly result in a 3rd party party

Compared to some of the big AAA games the Nintendo games should be cheaper to develop, at least in terms of content. Which is what everyone is claiming is the big challenge for the next generation.

As i said before, if they wanted they could just sell their old games on the current generation hardware and most likely make a fortune. But it seems they understand that their games go hand in hand with their hardware. Which i can understand. And i see no reason why Nintendo couldn't come up with a fairly powerfull console if they wanted. The 720/PS4 is the perfect blueprint for a WII3, just call AMD and ask for the same hardware

 

That's the key question. Are they going to be able to survive on 20 million consoles every 5 years selling content to loyal fans? How do they ensure they keep that minimum? The problem I see is they don't command the child market as they did, and there aren't people growing up on Nintendo games who'll be buying Nintendo consoles for another 20 years to play Mario and Pikmin and Animal Crossing. There needs to be an influx of new blood. Kids today seem more interested in COD and FIFA, so who is Nintendo's market going to be going forwards? If they can establish a product and sell it in suitable numbers to whoever, then that's okay. Although even though, modern business isn't about surviving, but growing. Shareholders who don't see growth will pull out their funds, and that seems to be what makes or breaks a company in this world as much as anything. If Nintendo can't grow their business, won't they inevitably be bought out by someone? That's how these things tend to roll.

 

Dunno, might be a better question for their shareholders Wii U level performance certainly isn't going to cut it. And neither is a GC level one is my feeling (but maybe it's something they'll learn to be content with?). It's a strategy that's going to see diminishing returns as the fanbase gets older and younger crowd moves on to other choices as Shifty suggests.

I wonder where Nintendo will be in 10 years. Still selling 20-30 mil lifetime low end hardware at a profit every 4-5 years? While MS & Sony will have moved on and pretty much solved the graphics, AR/VR, cloud, media, waggle, services and subscriptions issues by next gen. For Nintendo their IP is most important and keeping new blood playing it no matter what is better than trying to create lighting in a bottle each gen with a new accessory and limiting their user base.

 

That's both an interesting and a downright scary scenario you're setting up there! Nintendo's share price won't crash as long as they're sitting on that $10+ billion dollars methinks, but if they were to start losing money badly this could all change.

...And should they get bought out by someone - which would happen, considering all the epic IP that company's sitting on - what cows would be allowed to remain sacred once new management is in charge...? Just askin.

With a guy like Bobby Kotick holding the reins we'd see a new Zelda, Mario and Metroid yearly (well, semi-yearly, perhaps) until all three franchises are so wrung out and spent that nobody can be bothered to even bat an eye in regards to them anymore (he's done it before... He's gonna do it again!)