The Wii U has had a bit of a rough time since its release in 2012. Four years later, and it’s sold less than half the amount of units that the PlayStation 4 has, in a shorter amount of time. A lack of third party support, including Ubisoft dropping a lot of their development for the system, only helped make the blow even harsher to Nintendo.
As of now, the Wii U has sold just over 12 million units worldwide, compared to the original Wii’s 100 million and the 3DS’ 50 million. Despite this fact, software sales have been surprisingly high for the system, especially considering the install base.
There’s a few reasons the Wii U may not have performed as well as its predecessors or competing consoles. It may have been a lack of marketing, a lack of understanding on consumers part and a lack of initial software from the get go that showed off the technology not to mention the declining third party support. Despite all this, the Wii U was a surprisingly good console, and over the last few years has seen a great lineup of games.
The Wii U can even be compared to the Sega Dreamcast in many ways. The Dreamcast came out in 1998, a time when Sega was at the top of their game. They’d successfully made a line of video game consoles that could compete with Nintendo, and because of them, “console wars” became a thing. The technical specifications of the Dreamcasat weren’t a substantial improvement over the Saturn, and as hype began to build for the PlayStation 2, it hurt the system. The PS2 was clearly a more powerful system and would go on to see huge success, while the Dreamcast lost the support of big third parties like EA and Squaresoft.
The stories of the Dreamcast and the Wii U are surprisingly similar, and both consoles have come to be appreciated in their own right. In what could be the last year or two of the Wii U, we should take a look at the system and see everything that it actually had to offer. An underappreciated system with an absolutely phenomenal lineup of games. There’s a few aspects to focus on with the Wii U; technology, first party support, third party support and everything still to come for the system.
