Mon, Jun 04, 2012 | 11:26 BST
E3: Is Wii U a genius concept or a Frankenstein-box?
Nintendo courted both casual and core in its pre-E3 Wii U conference last night . Is it possible to truly bridge the two markets, asks Patrick Garratt, or has Iwata created a Frankenstein console as dangerous as it is genius?
We’re left with questions. Is Wii U core or casual? Motion or physical? TV or tablet? Young or old? Is Frankenstein’s monster a beautiful creation or a mad experiment, a dangerous mismatch of life-giving necessity?
Nintendo’s Wii U showing last night told us a great deal more about the console and its maker’s aspirations for it than anything we saw during E3 2011, signalling the arrival of a Frankenstein box being forced to house both the casual non-gamer and the core.
We saw a machine that must serve two groups. There is the “Nintendo gamer,” the demographic invested in services like Wii Fit that probably doesn’t own another games machine and would never play anything like Call of Duty, and there’s the core. Wii U will play core video games, and, in a tacit admission that motion controls don’t work for precision software, it will have a specific, Xbox 360-like pad on which to do so.
The newly-named Wii U Game Pad, too, has been core-ified, with proper twin-sticks and a revised ergonomic design for playing for long periods.
Wii U, we were told, will finally herald Nintendo’s arrival into the world of true, constant online connectivity. Miiverse, a social system by which the Miis of friends and others playing the games you own will be viewable and presumably accessible through Wii U’s UI, was seen for the first time. We also saw a Nintendo Network icon at the centre of a diagram promising cross-platform connectivity and presumably cloud features, although, in typical Nintendo fashion, PC, mobile phones and the like won’t be connected until some time after launch. Twitter and Facebook were nowhere in sight.
While the theory is obviously that the machine can capture the illusive core while reaping the monstrous rewards of appealing to the casual, the duality could be troublesome. On the one hand, as a conceptual piece of hardware, Wii U is enthralling. It’s driven by a concept of “together better,” according to Iwata, and it’s true that groups of people using traditional console hardware, tablets, TVs and mobiles can be worlds apart in the same room. Wii did an incredible job of pulling people together to play games, and Wii U will build on that success. The Game Pad is useful and well conceived, and will no doubt be imitated by the likes of Sony and Microsoft in their next generations – almost certainly by allowing control linking with tablets and mobiles.
What’s less convincing is the reaching out to the core and what we know about Wii U’s online services. It was obvious from the presentation yesterday that Nintendo now understands that having an inept online digital device in the modern age is laughable (quite how 3DS managed to get out of the door without robust online features is beyond me). What’s going to be difficult is timing. Nintendo isn’t so much late to the party with online connectivity as turning up to find people left the venue years ago, stopped taking drugs, got married and had children. Can Wii U’s online features really stand up to PSN and Xbox Live? Maybe for the casuals, yes, but for the core, with their friends lists, their cheevos and Trophies? Does a crowd of Miis round a Call of Duty icon represent a viable alternative to a decade of investment by millions of players into something like Live? It doesn’t seem likely.
The core aspects of Wii U we saw yesterday felt like an adjunct, as if Nintendo realises it has to court third-party software this time as the old trick of relying on first-party phenomena may finally prove too risky. Yes, it’ll be powerful enough to play current gen core titles, and yes, there’ll be a sensible controller on which to consume them. But it’s a casual machine first and foremost (quite rightly, given the ludicrous success of Wii), selling to the family and into age ranges outside of the traditional core. Note that even in the demo showing the guy playing his zombie game last night, an old man was included on the screen in the section about cam-chat. Nintendo can’t just “go core”: it has to keep one foot in the granny market.
And so we’re left with questions. Is Wii U core or casual? Motion or physical? TV or tablet? Young or old? Is Frankenstein’s monster a beautiful creation or a mad experiment, a dangerous mismatch of life-giving necessity?
What’s going to be difficult is timing. Nintendo isn’t so much late to the party with online connectivity as turning up to find people left the venue years ago, stopped taking drugs, got married and had children. Can Wii U’s online features really stand up to PSN and Xbox Live?
Hopefully the vision will be clearer after we see the software on Tuesday, because softness of focus in the console market can cause real difficulty. Sony suffered exactly the same shortsightedness with PlayStation 3: was it a media centre or an expensive games console? Microsoft’s billing with Xbox 360 was straight down the line at first, selling it as a core games machine, but we’ve since seen the company come under heavy fire for diluting the message by pushing games back behind services and introducing Kinect. It could easily be argued that Microsoft’s stab at the casual market with Kinect was ill conceived. In the early days, though, there was no confusion: Xbox 360 focused entirely on the core in the first few years of its life, and was successful against PS3 as a result, especially in building a premium service in Live. Wii, too, focused squarely at the casual user and blew the doors off all hardware sales records. Focus in the console business is key.
Is Wii U as clear cut a concept? It seems not, and the Janus syndrome of last night’s presentation may mean Wii U has a slow start later this year as people struggle to grasp exactly what it is and does. But at least Nintendo demonstrated it does understand now that connectivity isn’t an option any more, and it’s clearly grasped that core games are a specific thing that can’t be played using a casual interface.
Rather than fearing the monster, maybe we’ll all learn to love it. We’ll know better when Nintendo channels in the lightning and jolts it into life on Tuesday.
78 
Posted in: E3 2012, Nintendo, Wii U
Tags: nintendo pre-e3 2012 conference, Satoru Iwata
78 comments
Older Comments
#51
Ireland Michael
04/06/12, 12:20 pm
@49 It also had over a year and a half more time on the market.
I agree with most of what you’ve said, but this is a bit of a stretch.
#52
stealth
04/06/12, 12:21 pm
@ 50
It was successful with everyone
you dont sell 100 million units only selling to soccer moms and people who only bought 1 game. You sell it to normal gamers too.
#53
stealth
04/06/12, 12:22 pm
@51
So? Systems always have launch discrepancies……….
#54
Gekidami
04/06/12, 12:23 pm
@47
It shows the success of Nintendos marketing and a gimmick that caught the mass market eye. In no way does console sales reflect on the quality or number of a systems games.
@48
I sold my Wii about 2 years ago. Honestly, i’d rather rob myself of a few games then have Nintendo rob me by rebuying a system with so little going for it, both in terms of the actual systems functionality and its software. For the little it offers, the Wii isnt worth it, it never was and this point never will be.
And i expect the WiiU to be just be a rerun of this.
#55
stealth
04/06/12, 12:24 pm
@54
it shows that successful marketing can lead to successful sales. A consoles sales reflects quality for the individual purchaser and number of exclusives ( the top selling systems always have the most exclusives)
#56
stealth
04/06/12, 12:25 pm
@geki
is there a particular reason that your so insecure?
I mean there are plenty of games and systems i havent enjoyed but Ive never gone out of my way to say so on a forum…….
#57
Ireland Michael
04/06/12, 12:28 pm
@54 Now see, if you hadn’t sold it, you wouldn’t have to rebuy it.
Just because *you* don’t care about the games doesn’t mean they don’t matter, and nor does it change the fact that the format was a resounding success with some exceptional core games that can’t be found anywhere else.
#58
Gekidami
04/06/12, 12:29 pm
@55
The most exclusives? Sorry, what? The Wii has the less games and the only reason it might have more exclusives are because it got a lot of cheap shovel ware thats too expensive to make on PS3 & 360.
Nintendo doesnt make that many games either, they dont have the first party muscle Sony does, and to boot, they missed out on the third party stuff.
Going back to last year:
http://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-video-games-of-2011?tag=supplementary-nav;item;1
253 games on PS3, 25 of which rated above 7.5 / 261 games on 360, 21 of which rated above 7.5 / 69 games on Wii, 6 of which rated above 7.5
Less games and less higher rated.
#59
G1GAHURTZ
04/06/12, 12:31 pm
Yeah, if you didn’t sell it, you could have a lovely dust collecting box and bit of plastic sitting pointlessly on top of your TV instead of some cash!
How foolish!
#60
Gekidami
04/06/12, 12:32 pm
^ Exactly, decent games were so rare, it was pointless to keep it.
@56
1. I’m not going out or my way.
2. I came in here responding to someone.
3. Stop projecting. Go back and read your own posts.
#61
Ireland Michael
04/06/12, 12:37 pm
@58 Well obviously most Wii games wouldn’t appeal to you. Most of them don’t have guns or cars in them.
#62
G1GAHURTZ
04/06/12, 12:37 pm
@58:
69 games!?
I suppose that goes a long way towards explaining why Nintendo are try to win back the 3rd party devs.
They’ve clearly given up on the Wii, on the whole, and those figures prove it.
#63
stealth
04/06/12, 12:39 pm
Metacritic…….the most ignored site by gamers on the internet………..
Metacritic is less indicitive of anything than sales are
Your inclination towards sony and hate of nintendo is clouding your thoughts
#64
Ireland Michael
04/06/12, 12:39 pm
@62 Not really much different to how Microsoft gave up on the original Xbox. That machine basically died in the water the moment the 360 was announced.
#65
G1GAHURTZ
04/06/12, 12:43 pm
It’s completely different, because the Xbox didn’t have an install base of 100 million, did it?
There’s your proof on the quality of the Wii as a games machine right there.
An install base of 100 million, and most devs simply don’t want to make any games for it, because their games don’t sell.
#66
John117
04/06/12, 12:45 pm
Got a nice deal from Gamestop, change my two years old Wii and get a new Xbox 360. Best deal I ever made, I went from having 2 decent games from having far too many to choice from. Wii has it’s classic pearls but imo Zelda, Mario and games like that have become far too predictable…
I did’nt need to play Skyward Sword to know that Link was gonna save the kidnapped princess, adventure in temples while doing puzzles and in the end defeat the bad guy. Mario follows the same path, but he is milked like trophy cow after being in over 200 games and starring in 31. People complain that MS and Sony gotta make something new, but Nintendo apparently only needs two great franchises and some mediocre side characters…
#67
Gekidami
04/06/12, 12:45 pm
@61
Yeah, uh-huh. I bow down to wittiest man on the Internet. You’ve clearly just steam roll right over everyone else arguments with that, hot shot. How do you do it? I mean, just claiming everyone who doesnt agree with you must love ‘dumb’ games? Shit man, where did you learn debating skills of that calibre? Please enlighten us with more of your amazing wisdom.
@63
Less indicitive of anything than sales are, huh? Ok, as long as you agree that CoD games are the best to have ever graced gaming and Twilight is one of the better examples of the seventh art.
#68
stealth
04/06/12, 12:47 pm
I guess its only natural for the top dog to get hated on like this….
#69
G1GAHURTZ
04/06/12, 12:47 pm
@66:
Absolutely spot on!
+1
#70
absolutezero
04/06/12, 12:47 pm
There are a tonne of fantastic core aimed Wii games its just that no one knows they even exist. Like Ivy the Kiwi or A Shadow’s Tale.
Its worth owning a Wii now for the 3 fantastic RPGs that have just been released on it. Three JRPGS that are better than anything released on the competition.
I guess it entirely depends on how many games you think its worth owning a console for, Nintendo’s releases plus quite alot of titles from Grasshopper, Sega and Capcom means Ill never sell mine.
p.s. Buy Fishing Resort its fantastic.
“I did’nt need to play Skyward Sword to know that Link was gonna save the kidnapped princess”
I have some bad news for you.
#71
stealth
04/06/12, 12:52 pm
@70
Dont try and speak reason
my favorite wii games are fire emblem 10, super paper mario, arc fantasia, zack and wiki, monster hutner tri, baroque, phantom brave, and alot of other titles that arent shooters
#72
Ireland Michael
04/06/12, 1:04 pm
@66 “I did’nt need to play Skyward Sword to know that Link was gonna save the kidnapped princess”
Yeah… No.
Just like she *wasn’t* kidnapped in the majority of the recent Zelda games.
@70 Those games don’t matter! They’re not shooters!
#73
John117
04/06/12, 1:14 pm
@71
You accuse hardcore gamers for being unreasonable but your using your own insults which in now way makes you the better man.
And yeah, alot of popular games on Xbox/PS are FPS games, but they have a ton of great games if you bother to look past the wall of CoD and Battlefield. I had some great times playing Brutal Legend, Fable 2 and 3, Bayonetta, Batman AA/AC, Fallout/Skyrim, GTA IV, Mass Effect (1,2,3), and that’s not counting any FPS or arcade games.
@72
So you’re implying that Zelda didnt get kidnapped in Skyward Sword? Or the fact that she was kept in a castle against her will during TP. Or that Tetra aka Zelda was kidnapped in Windwaker… It didnt happen at the start of each game but it did happen…
And what’s up with using shooter games as some sort of insult, has anyone mentioned a shooter in this thread except the mocking of CoD?
#74
MadFingerz
04/06/12, 1:15 pm
I’m still in shock after that terrible video with the ridiculous gamer stereotype they decided to make…sigh
Aaaanyways, I don’t think I’ll ever buy a Wii U and I couldn’t care less about half of all the social features but I’m curious to see what kind of games it’ll have.
#75
stealth
04/06/12, 1:18 pm
The bottom line is the conference was exactly what had to happen
Get all the system stuff out of the way now
And E3 will be non stop games
#76
ManuOtaku
04/06/12, 1:28 pm
Its sad when “hardcore gamers” dont play a videogame console like the wii and/or DS, something tells me they are not that hardcore in the end of the day, they are only brand lovers, cause a hardcore gamer or avid gamer in that will play all consoles no matter what, and the most types of games regardless of its manufacturer or main target, the only requisit needed is that they are games, plays well and are fun the rest is blind foolisness.
On the topic at hand, i think the Wii U will do fine if they handle a good price point and a solid launch party of tittles, if they can do that it will do as well as the wii, that and keep making good games during is lifecycle, as they did with the wii, and i mean main nintendo IP,s , i think nintendo companys like retro, monolith, inteligent systems and HAL, are capable of doing great things IMHO
#77
OlderGamer
04/06/12, 2:22 pm
I am going to say this once. It will fall on mostly deaf ears.
There is no such thing as a hardcore gamer. And people that identify themselves as such are so full of themself they won’t understand what the hell I just said. Or why it is true.
There are only gamers. And gamers are people. And people range and vary.
And different people enjoy different things. That is a universal truth. It applys to most things from interier design to clothing to cars to food to, yes Movies, music, and video games.
Personialy I always have a laugh at people that think playing this or that game validates them in someway. Basicly they are just toys. You won’t gain a leg up in life because you play Halo or CoD, just like you won’t be a failure in life because you enjoy Mario Kart or Zelda. Truth be said you might be a tad bit better adjusted if you didn’t have a closed mind to one or the other. Or if you could accept the basic fact that different people enjoy different things, while not throwing stones at people that enjoy something different then you do.
Like I said deaf ears, I am sure.
But, go look at this generations top software sales. Nintendo dominates that list. With thier exclusives. And they beat multiplat titles across several systems. So obviously there are a lot of people that enjoy their games.
E3 is just starting, do yourself(and everyone else here) a favor. Stop trolling. Relax. Enjoy the show and the coverage here on VG247. Follow the stories on the subjects you enjoy.
Live and let live.
They are just video games.
#78
sh4dow
04/06/12, 5:52 pm
I find any talk about Wii-U and hardcore gaming just amusing. The hardware is FAR too weak to be taken seriously.
Of course there is a certain “niche” (a big one though) of people who have convinced themselves that power for some reason doesn’t matter, even though it always has, since the very beginning of video games.
But for anyone who has pursued this hobby for several generations, a discussion like that must seem like a joke.
Older Comments