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The story
The Wii launched in 2006 and ended production in 2013. While cumulative hardware sales topped 100 million units, a thread points out that the number of packaged software titles stayed at roughly half of the PS3’s total. On the 5ch Hardware/Industry (Geha) board, a thread debated why such a massive hit switched to its successor, the Wii U, after such a short run. Opinions were split between those who see it as a short-lived fad that third parties never fully bought into, and those who argue the Wii was never designed to be a long-running platform in the first place.
What people said
・Completely overhauling a game interface people had loved for years wasn't a good move
・During the shift to HD, the player base got split between it and PS3/Xbox
Third parties had zero motivation.
Sony brought out Move, so the direction shifted.
Sony was only ever chasing Wii's leftovers anyway, so they weren't motivated either.
That's basically it.
If it actually had something great going for it, those elements would've carried over to later hardware.
VR controllers are basically an evolved form of the Wii remote, right?
Dragon Quest X kept supporting it through the end of Version 3 even after hardware production ended (support was finally cut with Version 4 in November 2017).
That seems plenty long to me.
It was completely dead in its later years though.
Making the game react properly to how you swing the remote requires sophisticated physics calculations, but the Wii didn't have the power for that.
Swapping buttons for stick-waving just made things more tedious.
Given its limited power, the only physics simulations it could pull off were simple mini-games like bowling.
In other words, it was hardware that peaked at Wii Sports.
I thought it was just a showcase for what was coming, but there was no further development beyond that.
Gun-shooter games, which had gone extinct once displays moved to LCD, actually made a comeback on it, you know.
They pushed the Wii U out even though it was clearly unprepared.
They could've held off that year and kept milking the Wii a while longer instead.
I think the intent was to get ahead of the PS4, though.
Even so, the Wii Remote's pointer accuracy was way too low, making it hard to control the way you wanted.
(They clearly knew that — that's why they later released the Wii Remote Plus with built-in MotionPlus.)
People say it had more million-sellers than the PS2,
but in reality sales were abnormally concentrated in about 30 specific titles and the usual handful of 4 or so publishers that always do well on Nintendo hardware —
everything else barely sold at all.
By its third year on the market, pretty much all the buzz was about the Virtual Console.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Also, they couldn't keep manufacturing that GameCube-era CPU forever.
Core gamers disappeared almost overnight.
Those core gamers are basically an endangered species now anyway, and they barely buy software, so the Wii's direction was the right call.
Funny enough, Switch 2 went the other way and moved past Full HD pretty quickly.
It was short-lived garbage with a completely empty software lineup.
The only thing it had to brag about was coasting on its victory lap (resting on past glory) (lol).
It'll probably never get a remaster now, though.
What even was Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, honestly.
Back then it was completely the DS's era, so with home consoles it was just a constant pattern of people cheating on them with the PS3.
These days that same position has been taken over by PC, after all.
This was the last Nintendo console I ever bought.
If anything, the way Nintendo seriously pushed for a qualitative shift in gaming with the Wii and DS is exactly what made me love them.
No other hardware has ever taken risks like that.
Well, of course that happens if the controller's battery dies — that's just obvious.
The Wii chose to position itself around exactly that kind of casual relationship with gaming.
The painful part is that the DS ended up taking that exact position away from it.
The DS did well by balancing the traditional control style with the touch pen — it's a shame the Wii abandoned that balance entirely.
Calling it a 'failure' for lacking that is missing the point entirely.
It was never meant to appeal to people looking for that kind of thing.
But Nintendo doesn't really bet on that kind of lightweight, casual-game-centered approach anymore, do they?
If they considered it a success, they'd still be doing it.
The Wii's whole philosophy was: there's already a main console sitting front and center elsewhere, and it's fine if the Wii just quietly gets a spot off in the corner.
It gave up from the start on being some do-everything, all-in-one machine.
Now that Switch/Switch 2 have become the main console,
it's simply become capable of doing everything as a result.
This isn't unique to Nintendo — anyone keeps doing what succeeded and drops what failed.
It's as simple as that, isn't it?
Then wasn't the Wii a success?
Is the Wii U really a continuation of the Wii's direction, though?
Wii U, Switch, and Switch 2 all carry it forward, come on…
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The Wii had a run of roughly seven years, from its 2006 launch to the end of production in 2013 — not extremely short compared to contemporaries like the PS3 and Xbox 360. What the thread calls “short-lived” isn’t about poor sales; it refers to the fact that, despite how widespread the hardware became, third-party software support stayed thin, and the transition to its successor, the Wii U, happened abruptly. Cumulative hardware sales topped 100 million units, making it one of the best-selling home consoles in Nintendo’s history, but according to the figures cited in the thread, the number of packaged software titles was only about half that of the PS3. The biggest point of contention is this twist of “it sold, but it didn’t last” — opinions were also split on whether the Wii’s control scheme and low-performance approach carried through to the Switch, or whether that lineage was cut off once by the Wii U’s struggles.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Why the Wii Was a Huge Success Yet Still Short-Lived.”
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