At the time of its release, the manner on how it they'd marketed that was confusing as they showcased the Wii U gamepad as if its a portable console (its not) since its rather the main controller for the Wii U console. I was in high school when the console was first revealed, my reaction to that was "WTF?" as I thought the gamepad was portable, as the ads often flex that it can be (or the way they showed it came off as that).

The confusing name was the biggest reason I think. I was trying to sell it to customers back then and so many just couldn't grasp the name of it and got the two consoles mixed up.

Because it didn’t sell well.

Time for a new account already?

Usually the thing that's mentioned as a big marketing mistake is the name.

If you were already looking into it you'd probably know it was a new console. But to casual gaming enthusiasts (and those were a huge part of the wii/DS success), or to people that just didn't follow Nintendo news closely, it really wasn't clear.

Some believed "Wii U" was just a new attachment for a wii, or just a new wii edition, rather than an actual different console with about halfway gen7-8 capabilities.

They did the exact same mistakes with the "3"DS and only survived a very rocky launch with a quick repricing and a lot more marketing. Wii U never really recovered.

The name is usually what people blame, but if that’s the case why did they succeed with NES being followed up by SNES? Or Game Boy followed by Game Boy Color and then Game Boy Advance?

Hard to fault them for following a pattern that had worked great for them in the past.

Basically way larger audience. The big thing in gaming around 2005-ish is that everyone is a potential gamer, including people who mostly don't care about or are not used to specific console releases.

Also I'd argue a "Super" is a clearer mark of upgrade than a single, very random letter or number (that is specifically not used like a version number like "GameMachine 4" but instead a weird portmanteau).

Also counterpoint : Nintendo of America used a lot of marketing to try and make people stop calling consoles "a Nintendo", and part of this was the lack of distinction between NES and SNES (the other part was confusion with the competition).

Yeah, I was (and am) a pretty avid gamer and I didn't know that it wasn't just a tablet for the Wii until years later when it came up on some podcast where they were like "yeah, doesn't help that everyone just thought it was a new accessory for the Wii". A large number of other kids that I knew had Wiis. I never knew anyone who even mentioned the Wii U irl.

I'm also just now finding out that the 3DS apparently wasn't just the newest DS model like the DS->DSi? lol

IMHO it wasnt the name. The Wii was succesful because of the motion controls. Gaming was seen as a thing for kids, ugly nerds and couch potatoes. Probably still is to a certain degree but 20 years ago gaming acceptance was in whole different spot in the normie mindset compared to today. Nintendo was able to capture the non-gaming audience because they made gaming look active. Be it physically with the Wiis motion controls or these "mind jogging" games or whatever the fuck they were called on the DS. My mother bought a Wii back then... for herself. Wii Sports and that balance board thingy was her jam. She used that thing for a decade to stay fit. The mother of a friend had a DS which was used exclusivly by her for those puzzle/math games. Normies had Wii parties where they played Wii Sport together and bragged about the sore muscles they got the next day at work.

Yeah, well and then came a new box with a shitty Ipad as the main gimmick? While the normies started to play on their phone/tablet or just moved on to do something entirely different like idk joining a book club or nordic walking. Because the Wii was never about the games for them. At the same time they couldnt catch the core gamers attention because the Wii U could barely surpass the performance of the previous gen while the Xbox One and PS4 were on the horizon.

3DS was a new system and significantly more powerful than DS.

You can see it mostly on what 3D games on DS look like in comparison, they were generally very limited.
Of course 3DS had a rather low resolution (though already higher than DS), but it could do a lot more. Roughly, imagine going from N64 to Gamecube or Wii visually.

3DS also had a few specific abilities, obviously stereoscopic 3D, but also an analog stick (of sort, but still making a huge difference), console to console passive communication (street pass), NFC reader, and motion sensing (surprisingly great for aiming, made shooting in Zelda games a breeze).

3DS actually had its own new model with the "new 3DS" (that name.... they never learn).

This one was mostly the same but more convenient. A lot more stable 3D, especially if you're combining it with motion which was basically impossible before, a second (rather shit) analog stick, a second pair of triggers. You could have these new inputs on a standard 3DS through an accessory, so they just integrated them.

New 3DS was also more powerful, but a game needed to be specifically made or updated for the n3DS to access that extra power. Very few games were updated, and even fewer were exclusive to new, only notable one probably being Xenoblade Chronicles.

It's a commercial flop. Console didn't sold enough, compared to it's predecessor Wii, and the other consoles. Even the XBOX One sold 4 times than Wii U. Let this sink in. And having only a few consoles in the wild also means, less software is sold. The original XBOX sold 24 million and that is even almost twice as much as the Wii U.

• XBOX sold 24 million
• Wii sold 101.63 million
• Wii U sold 13.56 million
• XBOX One sold 58 million
• Playstation 4 sold 117.2 million

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles

It's not just the name. For many the tablet functionality didn't click with them too. Any casual (non gamer) owner of a Wii didn't have any reason to buy a Wii U. They were happy with Wii Sports and he controls. And hardcore gamers wanted to have something normal they can play games on it, like the other consoles have it. The tablet looked like a pointless big device, instead having a normal controller. Name was a problem too off course, but it was more than that.

I think the name was confusing, but it really only exasperated more fundamental issues. The product wasn't that appealing for most people.

The gamepad was a cool trick, but ultimately not being portable made it seem sorta pointless? I mean, that's cool that you can play it while someone else watches TV. But all the nifty ideas around asymmetric multiplayer or supplemental touchscreen controls/displays just come across as gimmicks.The gamepad was big and clunky and near permanently paired to one system (and within a few feet).

Third party support was never strong there, and the bits that were withdrew almost immediately. Nintendo themselves were struggling to put games out quickly, with the transition to HD, plus their studios' attention divided into making 3DS games.

The system was no powerhouse, so by the time other next-gen consoles released, it looked left behind. Unlike the Wii or the Switch, it didn't have an especially compelling gimmick or pricepoint to make up for that.

(I say this as a Nintendo nerd that had and loved the Wii U, just my impressions of how others perceived it.)

I think the name was bad, but I also don't think its failure is as simple as just that.

To me Super Nintendo sounds like a super version of the Nintendo, and Super is the first word.

Game Boy Color implies it is a Gemeboy with a color screen.

Game Boy Advance sounds like an advanced version of the Game Boy.

Wii U tells you nothing. It starts with Wii and then adds the nonsensical letter U, that's all the information the name conveys.

Probably because it combines two cool sounds: Wiiiuu and flop!

Super, Color, Advance all describe the console. The customer knows what they are getting.

U is a letter that gives no information. Is it a themed Wii for college kids? Is it a U shaped controller upgrade? Is it a screen addon? Is it an online social media thing?

If you had asked me before coming into this thread what the Wii U actually was, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. I knew it was a flop. I knew nobody who actually had one. I didn't even remember it had a screen. I knew I wasn't interested in getting one at the time even though I had a Wii and a 360 but didn't have either the PS4 or XBOne. So I think both the weird name and the fact it wasn't wanted or needed by anyone are to blame for its failure.

I really enjoyed the handful of games the Wii U got, but so many things went wrong.

Marketing was awful, as others have noted.

The Gamepad had a lot of limitations. Bringing the DS's second screen to a console seemed like a good idea at the time, but it just couldn't be used the same way. Human eyes cannot focus on two screens at different distances from the eyeball, so you had to shift your focus to one or the other. Multiplats couldn't be designed around it when other platforms had a single screen, so if they shoehorned in anything for the Wii U port it was obviously an afterthought.

Ironically though, I think the Gamepad's best feature ended up being its biggest double-edged sword. In order to support Off-TV Play, games had to be fully playable on a single screen again, disincentivizing developers from being too creative.

Third parties abandoned it pretty quickly. Marketshare wasn't there, specs were behind, and the gimmick wasn't worth extra work to support. Of course it was mostly a matter of marketshare, because if the system had been flying off the shelves they'd put up with the latter two caveats, but because it wasn't, they wouldn't.

There's also the fact that the rising cost of HD game development kept Nintendo from being able to adequately support both the 3DS and the Wii U at once. Once they lost third parties, Nintendo knew that they just could not keep the Wii U afloat on their own, so they had to make a decision to let it go in order to prioritize the better-selling system, then shift gears to have only a single platform for the next generation.

In addition to what others have said, a large part of the problem here was that the marketing heavily focused on the GamePad rather than showing the whole console. So it was an understandable mistake to think the Wii U was a controller. That's not a problem any of those other systems had, they were more clearly advertised as consoles.

3DS->n3DS was a lot like Xbox One -> Xbox One X

I genuinely have to wonder what world ya'll lived in when gaming in the 2000s was just for "kids, ugly nerds, and couch potatoes" in your experience.

It also didn't help that the 3DS didn't release with many (if any) games hahaha.

True, not a great launch catalog. I remember for the first few months it was still mostly playing DS games for me.

The only launch titles I had were Pilotwings Resort and Samurai Warriors Chronicles. Those are the only ones I was barely interested in.

Pilotwings was boring and the 3D effect was not implemented well at all. It relied way too much on outward 3D, which is a major cause of eye fuckery on the console. Most later games got this and used effects that pop out of the screen very sparingly, making most of the game world sink inward instead.

Samurai Warriors was, well, musou, and not balanced very well at the beginning. I didn't get far.

The reasoning behind it was the Wii was called like that because it was a console for everyone, as in "we".
Cue the weird ads with the two middle-aged Japanese men coming to random families with a wii in a suitcase asking "We would like to play!".

By Wii U time the market had changed a lot. They knew they wouldn't be able to count on casual gaming alone anymore (mobile apps had absorbed most of it) so they needed to recapture more traditional gamers too. So they added U, as in, "this console is not just the party console, it's for you, too!"

Yeah, it didn't work. It was confusing, didn't really roll off the tongue, and wasn't different enough from the original wii's name to get people to notice it.
Wii was a one-time trick, it worked because nothing looked or was named like that. They might have had more luck giving the U a completely new coat of paint.

Then again maybe not. They pulled the trick again with the Switch, because new name, and because that name reflected the real clever shtick of it, being a hybrid console. Wii U's gimmick was rather weak and hard to use well.

I remember preordering it in anticipation of the next Pokemon game, only for it to come out a year later for DS anyway. It was such a weird choice.

I wish the Ambassador Program felt a little more fulfilling :(