Fair points, but when I say they are "abandoning ship" I simply mean they are scaling back development and probably putting most of their big guns on NX stuff. I know they will release some stuff on the Wii U in the future, but I think it's going to be sparse.Ziggy587 wrote:Remember when everyone was complaining that the Wii wasn't HD. Then there were rumors that Nintendo was gonna make an HD version to replace the Wii with. Then a few years passed and the Wii U came out. Isn't that the same thing that's going on right now? Only difference is the number of Wii Us sold is causing people to think that Nintendo is going to abandoned the console. They would never do that.
Unlike the Wii not being HD, there's nothing wrong with the Wii U. Sales are poor, but abandoning it and releasing a new console early is not going to magically fix console sales. Think about it... What sense does that make?
Their E3 announcing left something to be desired, but that's only because we have already known about their biggest upcoming releases for a while now (Mario Maker, Star Fox, and Yoshi's Woolly World). But, a few things. One, what Popo said. Two, everyone is complaining "The Wii U is doing bad" and up until the end of last year you couldn't stop hearing "There's no games on the console!!!!" No wonder Nintendo is giving us news about upcoming games earlier than E3.
Three, no mention of the upcoming Zelda U game. IIRC, it was said to have a 2016 release. So we know that Nintendo plans to release a game for the Wii U next year, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that they're releasing more than 1 game for their console. The Twilight Princess GCN/Wii argument makes no sense to me. There's this. Also, the game makes use of the Gamepad. Twilight Princess was able to have the motion controls "tacked on". How will Zelda U be able to work on a new console without the Gamepad? Unless the new console also has a Gamepad style controller, at which case, what would be the point of releasing such a console and abandoning the U so soon?
They're very aware that a huge part of what killed the Wii U was marketing and a complete and utter lack of games for what seemed like an eternity (I'd argue PS4 has been even worse in the games drought department, but it has raw horsepower). If they focus their big guns on the next console and make sure it launches with several killer apps, they probably feel like it could make a big difference in sales.
I dunno, could be wrong obviously, but they could have shown off all the stuff we already knew about on the show floor and the press would have covered it fine. The moment they knew everybody was watching and hoping for new stuff, they announced nothing.
On the Zelda thing, I just said it wouldn't surprise me, not that it will definitely happen. I don't think your argument about the gamepad is necessarily a dealbreaker as :
1. Nintendo's next console could have a modified/rethought gamepad to maintain backwards compatibility with Wii/Wii U games and...
2. They could always pull the gamepad features out at this stage in the dev cycle. The game isn't completely dependent on them.
Finally, imagine if the Wii U would have LAUNCHED with Mario Maker instead of NSMBU. I think the outlook would be a lot different. *sigh*
Also - don't read this as a "Nintendo is doomed" prophecy. I don't believe that. Nintendo is a giant and will survive forever.
