StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I had never even heard of the Wii-U until I just read about it because of this thread.

According to Nintendo fanboys it is the most amazing thing ever and it has already buried the One and PS4. (Apparently Wii-U sales in the UK jumped 875% after the One reveal. I'm curious what the actual sales number were. I mean if it sold one, then sole 9, wouldn't that be a jump of 800%? )

Based on both those, I think Nintendo just did a piss poor job of PR not that they missed named it. I mean I don't consider myself a "hardcore" gamer, but I knew about the first fucking Wii's release.

GE: Sorry the sales jumped 200% and the sales rank jumped 875% on Amazon UK.

Havok wrote: Based on both those, I think Nintendo just did a piss poor job of PR not that they missed named it. I mean I don't consider myself a "hardcore" gamer, but I knew about the first fucking Wii's release.

They also did a really bad job of getting any games on it that people would want to play and hadn't already had for six months on other consoles.

WiiU is a total failure because it showed Nintendo didn't really understand why the Wii was popular and how the Sony/Microsoft systems had changed in response. The Wii was a fascinating thing given its time in the market, but the Wii U was a terrible thing and I hope it dies by christmas.

You might as well say that people thought the Playstation 2 was a slightly better Playstation. Obviously people want to keep leveraging their brand presence, and the subtitle is really just fluff. So much so that some incremental products have hundred of them (Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.0) and some have none (the iPad). I don't really think this is going to cause confusion that will lose sales - its far more important that the entire media industry is sucking Sony's dick and saying things like 'Xbox One neglects gamers' despite actually having games/exclusives announced, unlike PS4 at announcement.

Stark wrote:Are you seriously saying you think people will mistake a new product being sold in a huge launch with one that hasn't been available outside boutique collectors stores and garage sales for years?

Not when they are buying it from a retailer. But someone is looking for a cheap second hand one on Ebay some time after launch and run into an intentionally misleading auction, that's a different story.

Do you remember the auction for a PlayStation 2 Original Box And Receipt that sold for $425 ?
That's the kind seller I'm thinking of when I say intentionally misleading auction. Maybe not even that misleading.

Now add to that mix someone who doesn't have any interest in gaming themselves, they are just trying to buy the Xbox One as a gift for someone else. If there are pictures on the auction, they don't help as this person doesn't know what either console looks like. All they need to do is confuse the number '1' with the word 'one'.
Why would they be expecting the word and the number to have different meanings ?

Way to move the goal posts with "some time after launch"

Retail sales are going to make up the major bulk of purchases from actual stores and online stores.

The 100 (even if it is 1000) people that get duped on fucking ebay is in no way going to impact that. You are even more idiotic for making this point and we are dumber for reading it.

People lying about auctions is a problem anyway; if they put a picture of the old Xbox called 'the Xbox' and you want a new Xbox called 'Xbox One' and you buy it, you are an idiot and the free market will take away your money (and then ebay will give it back).

Outside any confusion early on it's not relevant anyway, because as long as they get enough sales to not instantly die in the ass (like the Wii U) they can tune their marketing. This of course is why gaming media is being so misleading, because gotta kill it before launch so we can all suffer through PSN's hilariously poor feature set for another ten years. :V

I just cannot believe these cunts can call themselves journalists without a just and loving god striking them dead from ass cancer. They have the balls to call the Xbox One's launch a disaster yet MS announced games and you know, showed off their console.

So looking at the Wii-U numbers, it has sold, world wide, and as of March 31st 2013, 3.4million units since it's launch in 2012.
Is that...bad?

It's not great, but there's a bit of waiting for the other shoe to drop. WiiU is still waiting for its big 1st party games- there's a Mario game out, but Nintendo's still sitting on Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros, Mario Kart etc. There's a perception that a lot of Nintendo fans haven't picked it up yet because they're wating for a price drop and for their favorite series to finally hit. How accurate this is, I couldn't say since it's mostly anecdotal.

Havok wrote:So looking at the Wii-U numbers, it has sold, world wide, and as of March 31st 2013, 3.4million units since it's launch in 2012.
Is that...bad?

Better to look month to month and find that after the firs two months the Wii sold more units than the Wii-U and that the Xbox360 and PS3 are both outselling the Wii-U. And this month it's not by a little it's by three times as much in the PS3's case. April saw three times as many PS3's sold as Wii-U's per VGACharts and twice as many Wii's as Wii-Us.

It's why the Wii-U is looked down on so much, while the Wii was selling 200k per month for two solid years the Wii-U is under 30k at this point.


*Edit
Put it another way, at this point in the Wii-U life cycle after six months the Wii had sold 9.27 million units, the Xbox 360 had sold close to six and a half million with PS3 pushing six million. Worse the Wii-U's sales were a lot more front loaded, at this time as the Wii-U's units per month falls the Wii's, PS3's and Xbox360 were all climbing.

Put it another way, at this point in the Wii-U life cycle after six months the Wii had sold 9.27 million units, the Xbox 360 had sold close to six and a half million with PS3 pushing six million. Worse the Wii-U's sales were a lot more front loaded, at this time as the Wii-U's units per month falls the Wii's, PS3's and Xbox360 were all climbing.

A real problem for the Wii U is that perception that it's some kind of expansion pack or bolt-on for the Wii. I think Nintendo botched things by making the name sound so close in this case. Super Nintendo doesn't sound like the same thing as a Nintendo, and Playstation 2,3,4 has a clear progression. Wii U doesn't really sound like something new.

And a person like myself that spends a ton of free time playing videogames, (although not a wide selection) never even heard of it.
There was a serious PR problem there.

The biggest problem with the Wii U isn't marketing, it's the lack of direction. A tablet controller as a console's selling point is a stupid idea. A console that is a tablet that is the controller that is made by Nintendo would have killed, but a gigantic touchscreen controller that doesn't function when the console is off is nothing more than a poorly-upscaled rip-off the DS's innovation. Add the Wiimote support and you have an expensive console with behind-the-times graphics and almost unlimited innovation "potential" that will never be utilized because it is so undefined. The DS and the Wii both introduced one big innovation, made it the centerpiece of the console, and essentially printed money. Introducing a poor attempt to cash in on the tablet craze and throwing in half-wrought rehashes of the DS and Wii innovations on obsolete hardware cannot produce the success Nintendo was hoping for. I will be mildly surprised if Nintendo's hardware division survives the Wii U and they don't go the way of SEGA.

On the Fanboy sites they are claiming that the hardware is custom made for... wait... let me just...

how do people keep getting that the wii u isn’t strong? from EA? geeze dude. do some fucking research. its heavily custom designed. Microsoft has to pay sony for the blue ray laser in every single system. half of the 8 gigs the ps4 has isn’t even for games or graphics. the wii u processor is underclocked to not stress the tri core. the custom built patented high speed optical drive can read faster than the ps4′s. the wii u operates like a 4 gig ram. Nintendo is just sitting back going “eh, they’ll figure it out.” I bet they cant wait for the 3rd parties to come crawling back so they slam the door in their face and laugh.

put it like this. wii u is like a custom built alienware built to specs while the ps4 is just strong parts from dell put together. yeah, it should be stouter. but u don’t know what they’ve done inside the tower. nothing in the ps4 or nextbox(yeah, I like that name, they shuda went with that) is custom. its just put shipped in. and put together.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:I will be mildly surprised if Nintendo's hardware division survives the Wii U and they don't go the way of SEGA.

It survived the GameCube, which came after a much less successful console than the Wii, so unless Shigeru Miyamoto blew all the profits for the Wii on coke and hookers, I think they'll stick around for at least one more home console out of sheer stubbornness. For the time being at least their situation isn't anything like that of Sega in 2001, who I believe hadn't had a major hit of any sort since Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles all the way back in 1994 (and didn't have a handheld line to fall back on).

Still, it seems that Nintendo got arrogant and assumed that since the 3DS did horribly to begin with and started selling well once they got some good games out, they could do the same thing with the Wii U. They don't seem to realise that the main reason the 3DS had the chance to turn itself around was that Sony screwed up the Vita so spectacularly - and even if they do get some good games out for the U this Christmas, can anyone really see both Sony and Microsoft completely screwing up the launch of their respective consoles?

DaveJB wrote:It survived the GameCube, which came after a much less successful console than the Wii, so unless Shigeru Miyamoto blew all the profits for the Wii on coke and hookers, I think they'll stick around for at least one more home console out of sheer stubbornness. For the time being at least their situation isn't anything like that of Sega in 2001, who I believe hadn't had a major hit of any sort since Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles all the way back in 1994 (and didn't have a handheld line to fall back on).

Nintendo survived the N64 and Gamecube despite being shat upon mightily in sales by the Playstations because they were making a profit on hardware sales directly and that was basically the height of their ability to directly print money with handhelds in general and the Pokemon brand in particular.

Now they're selling Wii U hardware at a loss and the 3DS had to have a massive price cut to pick up in sales because part of its natural market has been lost to tablets and smartphones.

Maybe Nintendo is making the slow move to that: Smartphones and Tablets?

They'd have to start to be 'making' a move. Sony is in no hurry to destroy its handheld market either.

Nintendo actually do have a couple of Pokemon-related apps on iOS, but it's mostly free fluff, probably to get people who don't currently own a (3)DS interested in the franchise.

Vendetta wrote:Now they're selling Wii U hardware at a loss and the 3DS had to have a massive price cut to pick up in sales because part of its natural market has been lost to tablets and smartphones.

By all accounts it's only a smallish loss they're making on the Wii U itself, certainly nothing like the $300 or so that Sony was losing on each PS3 at the start of that console's lifecycle on top of its already extortionate R&D costs. And the 3DS hardware (not sure about the 3DS XL) is now being sold for a profit even with the price drop, and that's before getting its own Pokemon game (which still print money very nicely).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the U is going to be some huge success or even turn in a GameCube-like performance, but I think those people likening it to the Dreamcast and saying it'll destroy Nintendo's hardware business fail to understand the circumstances which forced Sega to go software-only.

DaveJB wrote:By all accounts it's only a smallish loss they're making on the Wii U itself, certainly nothing like the $300 or so that Sony was losing on each PS3 at the start of that console's lifecycle on top of its already extortionate R&D costs. And the 3DS hardware (not sure about the 3DS XL) is now being sold for a profit even with the price drop, and that's before getting its own Pokemon game (which still print money very nicely).

True, but Sony were largely able to finance that $300 loss leader by selling HDTVs (the attempt to make people replace them all with 3DTVs hasn't worked out so well for them), Nintendo have a much more restricted revenue stream, if they don't make money from console hardware and games they're not making money. Whilst they might be making a profit on the 3DS and some on Pokemon (which is nowhere near as omnipresent as it was, even if it is still making money), a lossmaking home console isn't what they need right now, they're not in the kind of firm position they were 7-14 years ago.

Havok wrote:

how do people keep getting that the wii u isn’t strong? from EA? geeze dude. do some fucking research. its heavily custom designed. Microsoft has to pay sony for the blue ray laser in every single system. half of the 8 gigs the ps4 has isn’t even for games or graphics. the wii u processor is underclocked to not stress the tri core. the custom built patented high speed optical drive can read faster than the ps4′s. the wii u operates like a 4 gig ram. Nintendo is just sitting back going “eh, they’ll figure it out.” I bet they cant wait for the 3rd parties to come crawling back so they slam the door in their face and laugh.

That is completely laughable and ignorant, where is it from? The Wii U hardware was cost squeezed down (in both dev and manufacturing) to a fairly pathetic state, to free up budget for the monstrous controller and to maintain Nintendo profit margins. Not only is the 'half the PS4 memory reserved wrong' (Sony background tasks use the least reserved memory in this generation), the criticism is in fact correct and far more pertinent for the Wii U (half of its already cramped 2 gigs is reserved for Nintendo crap that isn't even as useful as XBL or PSN).

put it like this. wii u is like a custom built alienware built to specs

Talk about damning with faint praise.

Stark wrote: its far more important that the entire media industry is sucking Sony's dick and saying things like 'Xbox One neglects gamers' despite actually having games/exclusives announced, unlike PS4 at announcement.

Will there be much backlash when they realize that Sony's constant statements saying that publishers get to decide if second hand sales happen means that publishers will be blocking used game sales on the PS4 ?