It's still unbelievable to me that Nintendo launched their brand new, generational leap in power system with a Name that did not distinguish it as a new system, hardware that looked exactly the same as the predecessor, and a launch title that beyond higher resolution looked exactly like a game possible on earlier hardware.
It's not like they were super productive during the end of the wii era.
It's simply unbelievable.
Skyward Sword should have been delayed and completely redone as an HD wiiu exclusive. Or something...
With how Skyward Sword ended, I don't think it would have helped all that much frankly.
Unless you mean scrap it and redo a WiiU exclusive Zelda for launch, then yes it would have probably have been far more popular.
Wait, when you say performance, do you mean sales ? Because if so, that's wrong, NSMBU did better on the WiiU than NSMB did on the Wii. Around 40% of WiiU owners have NSMBU, while only 30% of wii owners have NSMB. And that's without counting the fact that wii U owners also bought New Super Luigi U and Mario Maker ( 3M and 4M respectively) whereas wii owners only had one game
That's dumb by that metric SMB3 is one of the worst perfoming Mario game ever.
People will buy hardware to get to software, if the game isn't selling hardware it's not really doing its job.
another dumb take
you can't blame a historically awful game drought and poor hardware sales as a result of the last big game to release. the Wii U after launch and until Pikmin 3 in August of 2013 had quite possibly the worst software drought of any piece of gaming hardware ever. that has nothing to do with NSMBU failing to carry the load for just about an entire calendar year.
The thing is NSMBW kind of did in 2010.
Nintendo's 1st major release (as far as marketing goes) in 2010 was Capcom's Monster Hunter in April.
NSMBW performed so well it managed to keep it's momentum well into 2010.
NSMBU just dropped in comparison.
Nintendo isn't really about recouping losses, I am sure they make plenty of money off of the vast majority of their releases. These Wii U ports and even 3DS ports are more about games reaching a greater potential at a relatively low investment cost. Mario Maker 2 or whatever the next entry ends up being has a great growth potential for them, I highly, highly doubt they are done with the concept.
the games they've ported are never ultra unpopular games though and considering that their business model I don't think they've had an unprofitable game that wasn't Other M level of performance.
So yeah you're right.
It's going to be interesting to see Mario Maker 2 and how they're going to make it work for Switch, that's for sure.
I don't mean to be mean, but what the fuck? The Wii U failed because it was the Wii U. It was a poorly marketed, badly executed botch job of a console. Blaming the failure of the Wii U, even partially, on NSMBU is pretty asinine. New Super Mario Bros. Wii came out on one of the hottest consoles ever released in its prime. New Super Mario Bros. Wii was the culmination of everything Nintendo was working towards that generation, after releasing Wii Sports and the subsequent juggernauts like Wii Fit, it and Mario Kart Wii were what bridged the gap between the incoming "non-gamer" crowd and the core Nintendo fan base. It had a major new feature with 4-player 2d Mario for the first time ever. The Wii U game doesn't have this, it is the fourth title in the series that doesn't do much relatively new besides refinement. It came out at the start of a console cycle and did not have the build-up granted to the Wii release. These situations are not the same and you can not blame the game for the demise of the Wii U.
NSMBW performance is akin to Mario Kart really, they could have released that before MK Wii and it still would have done similarly.
NSMB bonkers performance shows that there was clearly an opportunity to take for years.
The WiiU game was unexciting and failed to properly carry WiiU, you could write a thesis on all the factors that made WiiU fail and I still maintain that NSMBU is part of it.
Of course an underperforming title is not enough to doom a system, NSMB2 was even more underwhelming and managed to sell more than 12M after all.
I would blame Nintendo's lack of vision at the time and their inability to figure out how to duplicate their success from the Wii. They were not prepared for the jump to HD in terms of developmental resources and really failed to have anything ready at all for the first half of 2013. I guess at most you could say NSMBU is representative of Nintendo's lack of understanding of the market at the time. Nintendoland, which was what they meant to be their new Wii Sports, was probably the bigger failure though.
NintendoLand is a fantastic game that is nearly impossible to make exciting without playing it.
they took the Wii market for granted and after ignoring that segment for more than a year, they wonder why they're not coming for more :/
Whatever the fuck they did with WiisportClub and WiifitU is probably one of the biggest mistep they had.
Sure there is. There is always an incentive and a hole to fill when free money is there for the taking and that is what these ports are. I don't see why Nintendo couldn't put the port in late October or early November. And I'll reiterate myself, I think most of these games were previously profitable, Nintendo releasing these ports is just opportunism.
Agreed on the opportunism, November is a bit weak but that's because SSB is so late I guess.
Basically, you're trying to say NSMB U wasn't the system selling title like Mario 64 or BotW?
In that sense I agree, it's obvious that NSMB couldn't carry the Wii U, but I doubt there is much that could. The Wii U had so much going against it outside of software that I think just about any other game would have suffered a similar fate. NSMB failed to carry the console, but that's not why the console itself failed.
That's the entirety of my point, yes.
Nintendo needs to follow up on Wii Sports. That concept 'died' because Nintendo simply stopped bothering. People still like sports and I'd be willing to bet a Wii Sports follow up would be a massive success.
WiiSports Resort was the follow up.
Problem with WiiU was that it was trying to ditch its Wii core message while trying to keep the name.
A Switch follow up on WiiSports would need to be more than just an online enabled update on the Wiisports concept.
The market for Switch and Wii couldn't be more different after all.
