> A bolder move than the Wii U would have been to completely flip the tables and infiltrate the cellphone gaming market.
Don't judge Nintendo by the Wii and its descendants--consoles are increasingly irrelevant, and "casual game" consoles doubly so. Multiplayer = internet play, these days. Nintendo knows that: the Wii U is a definite niche product, aimed straight at those rare instances when you actually have lots of people in a living room who want to sit around a TV and play the same video game at the same time. Playing games with your kids, or at a party; not fragging d00dz on a leaderboard. It's why the Wii line's online story is so bad: the whole console is aimed at the multiplayer you do offline.
So, as I said, don't judge Nintendo by the Wii. It's not their main business any more. Instead, judge Nintendo by the DS, and its descendants. It's increasingly where all of Nintendo's actual "game" games have gone. And its online story is becoming better and better with each generation--it might actually become a phone one of these days, who knows. (I could see Nintendo buying a Japanese phone company, firing all their industrial+UI designers and putting the DS people in charge, and then building a "Nintendo DS" that happened to internally be an Android phone.)
The problem is that we have to value Nintendo as a business and the Wii is costing them money. I'm replying from my phone at the moment but Nintendo is losing money. Hopefully someone else can paste sources. With the wii u performance, the DS family is also at risk.
Don't judge Nintendo by the Wii and its descendants--consoles are increasingly irrelevant, and "casual game" consoles doubly so. Multiplayer = internet play, these days. Nintendo knows that: the Wii U is a definite niche product, aimed straight at those rare instances when you actually have lots of people in a living room who want to sit around a TV and play the same video game at the same time. Playing games with your kids, or at a party; not fragging d00dz on a leaderboard. It's why the Wii line's online story is so bad: the whole console is aimed at the multiplayer you do offline.
So, as I said, don't judge Nintendo by the Wii. It's not their main business any more. Instead, judge Nintendo by the DS, and its descendants. It's increasingly where all of Nintendo's actual "game" games have gone. And its online story is becoming better and better with each generation--it might actually become a phone one of these days, who knows. (I could see Nintendo buying a Japanese phone company, firing all their industrial+UI designers and putting the DS people in charge, and then building a "Nintendo DS" that happened to internally be an Android phone.)