Who's to say a console is doomed? How are we to judge its performance or future prospects? We may think these are obvious questions we can answer from our comfy seats, but maybe we should cop to the unpredictability of market forces and how the gaming industry's workings can be more complicated than any one person can tell.
Among Media Create's numbers from yesterday sneaked in some news we unfortunately missed the first time: Wii U has sold over a million units in Japan. The system launched December 8, 2012 in the region, and in week ending July 21, 2013, has sold 1,005,018 units. This matches the performance of the Playstation 3 in a very similar time frame. Sony's cell powered console came out on November 11, 2006, and reached the millionth milestone on July 18, 2007.
Looking at both consoles' histories, their concerns and performance do not exactly match, but there are some parallels. Both struggled with a dearth of titles in its first few months, perhaps with poor planning, and a self-defeating cycle of 3rd party developers staying off the consoles until they performed better, to blame.
On the other hand, Wii U had more going for it in these first few months, seeing as it was the first next generation console to come to market, and had a solid number of launch titles, the most any console has ever had. This was a lead arguably squandered as they struggled to keep titles coming out the pipeline.
On another end, while PS3 developers struggled to work with the Cell architecture, the Wii U has been proven readily able to handle ports of games from other systems, as well as development of new games, easily. Nintendo even went out of their way to collect a suite of tools for their dev kit, such as Unity and Green Hill Software's MULTI IDE, and is now continuing that work into developing the Nintendo Web Framework. So Nintendo faces completely different challenges than Sony did and needs different solutions.
At this point, I won't be the guy who dispenses armchair advice on how Nintendo should rally the Wii U around, but the tide of bad news may be starting to lift for the console. We should learn our lesson a meme or two ago and not hasten to call a console names.
Source: GENGAME
