Jay Leonard
Credit: Nintendo
By all the most important metrics, Nintendo’s Wii U has been a flop. After 30 months, lifetime sales sit at a paltry 10 million, over 80% less than the pace set by the original Wii. The Wii U’s big gimmick—a giant, touchscreen-enabled gamepad—has failed to click with consumers. Meanwhile, support from third-party developers is as low as it’s ever been for a Nintendo gaming machine.
Global Video Game Console Sales (in Millions) | SpecOut
Longtime fans know none of this is new. After dominating the early ‘90s with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo has had three sales flops (the N64, GameCube and Wii U), next to just one sales hit (the Wii). Sony has since assumed control, while Microsoft has eaten all of the biggest crumbs. Even in the reliable handheld market—a business where Nintendo still performs better than most—the smartphone has cannibalized a majority of customers.
Wii U: The 3rd Wheel | SpecOut
Enter Splatoon. Billed as an “online shooter” but marketed like a wacky new cartoon from Nickelodeon, Splatoon is colorful, offbeat, full of attitude, and entirely bizarre. It’s also Nintendo’s best hope to save the Wii U.
For gamers, the premise is one part familiar, two parts eccentric. First, the familiar: grab a weapon, team up with three other random players, and battle against another team of four.
Now the bizarre: instead of shooting bullets, you’re spraying ink. Instead of trying to kill your opponents, your main task is to cover the stage with more of your color than the opposing team. And don’t bother running around—the fastest way to travel is by changing into a squid, where you can swim through your ink twice as fast as you can traverse on foot.
Sound ridiculous? It is, but don’t let that stop you from playing the game. Compared to the gritty realism of genre favorites like Call of Duty, Splatoon’s gameplay is fluid, intuitive and incredibly fresh. You’ve never played a game like Splatoon, but once you’ve inked your first patch of turf, you’ll never want to go back to trenches and bullets.
In typical Nintendo style, Splatoon blends easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master better than anyone in the industry. From your very first match, you’ll be making meaningful contributions to your team, painting corners and inking side paths, all while serving as a decoy for your more experienced teammates. Later, you’ll learn deeper strategies, like swimming up walls, bouncing “splat bombs” through hallways, or playing mind games with opponents as you pop in and out of each strategically placed splotch of ink.
Like all online shooters, Splatoon oozes replayability. Most gamers will play through a single player adventure game once, but online multiplayer allows for months of fresh battles, as your human opponents learn new strategies and better adapt to the game’s environments over time. It’s for this reason that Splatoon—Nintendo’s first homemade title to focus almost entirely on online play—is so critical to maintaining a happy, growing community of Wii U owners.
Credit: Nintendo
Can Splatoon save the Wii U? Probably not. The console’s first two years were likely bad enough to relegate the Wii U to this generation’s third place, behind the surging PlayStation 4 and modestly popular Xbox One.
But with Nintendo now officially developing games for smartphones and working on a brand new piece of hardware (codenamed the NX), Splatoon might mean something even more important in the long run. Nintendo’s still got that same old magic. And this time, it didn’t even need Mario to cast the spell.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Stop with all the “Will X save the Wii u” nonesense titles. Nintendo doesn’t need saving. Their systems have never been sold on lies like Sony and their PS4. 22 million sonsole sales was and forever shall be a hype train that anyone with half a brain and an IQ higher than 85 can see. How the hell can Sony have that many in peoples homes if for their games you need to update their consoles day 1 of purchase? Bull crap. They haven’t sold that many to consumers, those are retailer purchases and everyone knows this. There have only been up 13m new users signed up and into their ps4 consoles to update. So how the hell does that make sense? Why did my local Best Buy have over 100 PS4s lying around from nearly 4 months ago? Hype is hype and the sheep will follow.
Nintendo is to be blamed for low Wii U sales. First they gave new system similar name and the looks to the old one. Then they marketed it poorly. Until Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Splatoon came out nobody knew much what Wii U was. Now though recently released Amiibos are flying of the shelves. That suggests that people are becoming aware of Nintendo’s latest system. One other fact is that Wii U is hardly possible to find in supermarkets. Neither are it’s games. Online retailers only are selling those. That doesn’t help when Xbox and PS with their games are on shelves and Wii U is missing.
It depends how you define success. Up until the last few years, Nintendo remained profitable for their entire public financial history. The ‘hit’ playstation and successful Xbox, on the other hand, were loss making for years.
I hope that the Wii U can be saved – it’s a decent system. The games are fun, the graphics are good and I always have lots of fun playing it. And the Wii U has the virtual arcade – a feature that I honestly think ought to be a selling point since that service has a lot of value in it.
The Wii U had such a rocky start that I can understand it floundering a bit. But as far as the actual system goes (As opposed to the marketing of it), it’s a decent little game playing box that ought to command more respect than it’s gotten.
This game was the clincher for me. I bought my WiiU a few days ago (came with a free download for Splatoon and all updates). I was interested of course as well in MarioKart 8 and picked that up too, and am mildly interested in Mario Party and Yoshi’s Wooly World, but Splatoon was the game that made me decide a WiiU would be worth it. And of course, those other games mentioned will make sure I get ample use out of the system.