The Wii hurt Nintendo more than it helped them

Conventional thought is that "Wii was immensely successful and it was the Wii U that suddenly out of nowhere, failed Nintendo". Wii was a horrible decision. Much like if an athlete were to just sit around and eat donuts, yet still be thin. And then, few years later they wake up to realize that they're in horrible shape as if it happened out of nowhere.

Wii brought in short-term profits for Nintendo, but it also caused them long-term problems.
* Casual gamers were fair-weather consumers and Nintendo failed to provide them with more games as significant as "Wii Sports"

* Wii started the precedent where Nintendo wouldn't get more than half of the third party multi-play support. Gamecube got most of the third party multiplats.

* Nintendo alienated "hardcore gamers" plain and simple by having to play constant catch-up with weak hardware.

* Wii started the predecent where a conventional but perfectly fine controller would be less acceptable than the perfunctory gamepad.

* Wii viewed the casual gamer as a simple-minded person who couldn't handle hardcore games. Now that we see many people who haven't had a lot of history with gaming coming onto action games like Mass Effect, COD and Skyrim (including women), this is invalidated.

* The divide between casual and hardcore also created a pricing problem. Due to the casual consumer and the expensive Wiipad, Nintendo had to make a price that was neither affordable nor economical to many people.

The Wii gave Nintendo billions of dollars in revenue, getting them a safety net to weather multiple failures like the Wii U. You forget, a business is ultimately in it to earn money, and the Wii is probably the single most profitable product in video game history.

The WII/DS period made close to $20 billion profit for Nintendo, yup massive failure ROFL.

wii put the nintendo brand back in the spotlight.....gathered a whole bunch of new market..

nintendo just has to make them come back for the wiiU....

hardcore gamers are garbage...20million for the gamecube? haha screw all those pretendos.

I'll take that. Great games everywhere.

Will they come back for WiiU???

Even one of Nintendo harshest critics would agree with you on that last line.

You mean that moneymaker?

wii party U, wii fit U, wii sports club... all this holiday

lets see.

Yes, the Wii made a lot of money. But they're spending that money cleaning up the mess that is the Wii U

150 million loss on the WII U verus 20 billion on the WII.

Nah, the Wii was good. An awesome start to Nintendo dominance.

But Nintendo just simply opted to not listen to 3rd parties, or their consumer base, and made the Wii U the way it is. They killed all momentum they had from the Wii.

Nintendo has always been about family-friendly fun games, and the Wii Remote was a step up over traditional gamepads in functionality (the tech was a bit behind at launch though, but today the tech exists to improve the Wii Remote 10x over). Neither of those aspects caused the problems Nintendo faces today.

@drekula2: Not an easy answer. On one hnd, they widened their market, a huge win, but their HR experience is... lacking, to say the least.

Not entirely. Pyrrhic victory I guess in some ways, but money is awesome no matter what.

No, Wii made them a ton of money, they should have quit while they were ahead or went back to the drawing board.

Despite the original Wii's success, I don't think the Wii and the Wii U can coexist in the market together. There is just too much confusion and miscommunication amongst consumers regarding the two consoles.

so what was the alternative? do what MS and sony were doing? great idea if you want nintendo to go out of business fast (as this is SW im guessing you probably do). if the wii was a 360 clone nintendo would be lucky to break 15million in sales.

nintendos problems with the wiiu have nothing to do with the wii. they gambled, it hasnt worked, there going to be getting a bloody nose for the next 4-5 years for it (unless they manage to hit gold....cant bank on that though). the wii has allowed ninty to build a war chest so that they can endure when this happens. its not the first time and it wont be the last.

Nintendo made way too much money for the wii to be considered negative to them in some way. We're talking billions here. They had many games sell 20-30 million copies. They sold 100 million hardware units and all at a profit.

Even if they lost some credibility in the industry and suffer losses with the wiiu they have more than enough juice left over from last gen to get another kick a the can 5 years from now.