Of the big three i easily have the most faith in Nintendo. Why? Because they know how to make games i enjoy, and have been doing so for well over 2 decades.
Nintendo put themselves in a tough spot, with dwindling Wii sales they were left with the choice of having no Console choice or having one with no games(very few). It can be argued which is the better option, obviously both suck.
I do not consider Nintendo in trouble, there base(as has been proven time and time again) will always be there(mainly because they stick to there guns, for better or worse). Point & case of this is the 3DS, when this was release for a good 7-8 months it was considered a horrible console, with its best game being a remake of "The Legend of Zelda OOT"(arguably). Look at it now it is considered to be the best running console available. Granted it some good games in this 7-8 month period, but not much.
My point is, when it comes down to it, games sell consoles, and the WiiU has no games, at all really. Once they come, and they will, the console will be in at least fine shape. I personally have not bought one, but it is on my list above both the xbox1 and the ps4.
Are you kidding? Of the big three, I consider Nintendo dead-man walking. The reality is that the console business is a big company game, and Nintendo is just too small. You need to sink billions of dollars to develop and subsidize the console, be willing to lose money for years and then do it all over again 6-10 years later. Microsoft can do it, and Sony can do it, Nintendo can't. They need to make money because unlike Microsoft and Sony, they don't have other revenue streams. This necessities them releasing under-powered consoles. They got lucky with the Wii. They are not so lucky with the WiiU.
They are still the king of mobile console gaming ... sort of. Tablet and smartphones are eating away their bottom line, and the trend will continue (the minute that Apple and Google decide to focus on mobile gaming in earnest will spell the end of Nintendo). The problem for Nintendo is that mobile gaming is an afterthought for Apple and Google. They don't need to do well in that area to survive, however every point of marketshare that Nintendo loses because little Johnny is fine enough playing games on his iPad instead of buying a 3DS hurts Nintendo incredibly. Everyone will have a smartphone or a tablet, so justifying a 3DS purchase is that much harder.
They make good games, yes, but it won't change the fact that they are in a lot of trouble.
IMO, net income falling for five years with no end in sight is not "doing just fine." Just because people have wrongly claimed something in the past does not mean that they can't be rightly claiming it now.
Can anyone honestly look at these numbers and tell me Nintendo is doing "just fine?" I can see, "might be OK," or, "will not definitely die," but "just fine," is a total self-deception, especially with the recognition that the bump at the start of this year includes the sales of a new console.
If I recall correctly, they always go in or near negative when they launch a new system. Launching something like a console is expensive and causes much trepidation in a volatile place like a stock market. You can't judge a 124 year old company by the occasional bad quarter.
I'm not judging them by one quarter -- for starters, the financials for 2012 on my link are the whole year. Anyway, if they were still developing consoles that had staying power or mass appeal, I wouldn't consider these financials significant.
(The Wii did not have staying power -- many people bought it because it was neat but then didn't use it. That's not a recipe for long-term success. The WiiU doesn't even have the mass appeal the Wii had, and its staying power has yet to be proven.)
I've read this same thing at every launch of every Nintendo console for as long as I've paid attention. "Oh no, look at these bad financials, and remember how bad the last one did." Never mind that they still turned a profit even on the "dud" consoles like the N64 and Gamecube. Nothing here is out of the ordinary.
I could see this if it were some random company faltering after a big hit propelled them into the spotlight, but this is no random company pulled from obscurity. Nintendo has a history of pulling through.
I read the same claims about poor staying power for the Gamecube and N64 too. The only difference with the Wii is a lot more people use the Wii as a paperweight than did for the N64 and Gamecube.
The end of 2006 was the launch of the Wii, the end of 2012 was the launch of the Wii-U. The DS launched at the end of 2004 (the DS lite mid 2006). Nintendo is in unprecedented financial trouble. It doesn't mean their dying by any means, but considering that an increasing number of next gen. console competitors are headed to market over the next year, it's hardly enough to say "Nintendo has been on the ropes before, they'll pull through!" They've never been on the ropes this badly.
The genesis of this entire thread is Nintendo admitting HD was harder to do (more expensive) than they expected. 2013's positive number seems to indicate they're close to getting a handle on it.
7.3 is not positive. It's zero. It's borderline statistical error compared to their past successes. And competition is coming in 2013, with very strong hardware and software to back them up. Of course Mario will keep selling to some people, but Nintendo is done for for this generation in home systems.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Since the N64, nintendo consoles have always been for those who didn't want the more hardcore consoles, or wanted one in addition to. They are in no more "trouble" from the coming next gen xbox and ps than they were any previous generation. Excluding Wii they have been a niche console for generations. Absolutely no one (in the statistical sense) is thinking "should I get the wii-u or the xbox/ps4". As long as they are not competing for the hardcore market, what Sony and MS do are irrelevant to Nintendo's financials.
>Excluding Wii they have been a niche console for generations...
Niche or not, hardcore market or not, the question is can Nintendo sell 30-50 million WiiUs? If they can, they'll have a viable platform that will at least be a good enough vehicle for Mario games. If they can't, they're done on the console side.
OK, you're entitled to your opinion, I guess. For me, it seems like there is good reason to doubt, considering that the WiiU is selling even worse than the Gamecube, is falling off faster, and is running against stiffer competition.
Historically Nintendo has sold consoles off their first party titles. They have released a total of 1 so far. Judging their sales off 1 title is probably a bit premature.
Circling back to Nintendo realizing how much harder HD development is. I think the WiiU will pick up once Nintendo tunes its development process for HD and gets some titles out.
Except that when Nintendo does so, MS and Sony will have "super-HD" titles to show off. It's the Wii all over again, with 10 years backward hardware. Nintendo can't win this fight without innovative concepts, and the WiiU's one if clearly a failure : it does not appeal to gamers or casual gamers. Their Nintendolands is not a Wii Sports. So what you have left is nothing but a Gamecube, but probably even worse than that. The Gamecube was more or less at the same level as the rest of the competition at the time in terms of power, now Nintendo will have a hard time proving 1st party titles are enough to sell.
Mouhaha. "unprecedented success". They just managed to sell a lot of boxes with ONE game per system. The Wii is probably the first console where you have the lowest number of games sold per unit on average, because so many casual gamers bought it and left it lie in the dust after playing with it a couple of times.
Hell, I'm a hardcore gamer, and all I ever used my Wii for was to play Metroid Prime with a gamecube controller, since I never had a gamecube. (My wife won the thing at a raffle.) It's sitting there gathering dust.
Sure it has. The industry is much bigger. Game development is more expensive. Online strategy is important. Consoles cost more to develop and are frequently sold at a loss for years. There's competition from non-traditional markets ( tablets and smartphones and in the future, Android set-top boxes and the like). Indie gaming has made a resurgence.
I agree. I don't see Nintendo still being a hardware company in 10 years. They are either liquidated, sold to someone else for IP's, or transform into a software game company. I hope it's the latter. There is no money in hardware, it has no future outside of ever-tinier margins.
This makes me sad. Nintendo games (even the sequels) exhibit creativity and appeal an order of magnitude beyond the "mainstream" games which simply rehash visuals and weaponry. I think they are the closest to mastering games as an "art form."
Nintendo has many great games and they certainly have great brands, but let's no go overboard here. Nintendo is perfectly willing to "rehash visuals and weaponry" by releasing yet another Mario or Zelda game.
I don't think you can look at what Nintendo does in that light, especially because of the usual sense "rehash" is used in.
For example, COD(yes i know this is the obvious dead horse, but it is so for a reason). It is a fact, that every game since COD4 till present is running on the SAME GAME ENGINE, updated yes, but the same game engine. Virtually the exact same game mechanics. Same for games like "Madden".
But then you have Nintendo. Lets look at Mario. Every console has had a different style of Mario, platforms all, but incredibly different and yet people love them for the same reasons.
THAT is what makes Nintendo awesome, its that they can make games that both the aspects of being different and the same add to the game. Zelda, while not as much the same recipe, is mostly the same.
> For example, COD [...] Virtually the exact same game mechanics.
For single player, sure, but COD is a multiplayer focused game. The meta game in Black Ops 2 (the pick 10 system) is new to COD and has really changed up the game mechanics. You see a lot of diversity in player load-outs and strategies, making the game on the whole a lot more entertaining and have a lot of replay value.
I disagree. Have you played the "yet another Mario or Zelda" games? They are all entirely unique in their own way and I never feel like I'm repeating myself when I play them.
I don't think there's any reason to be sad. Zelda and Mario aren't going anywhere -- they just might be showing up on Xbtwo and PS5 instead of the Wiii.
Nintendo's been mainly working off their portables for years, really. The N64 didn't sell that great either, and the Gamecube did pretty awfully, ending up selling what few units it did almost entirely on the merit of its first-party games and a couple rare gems, like Tales of Symphonia. The Wii was unusual -- the Wii U is more "normal", by Nintendo sales standards!
Fortunately for them the 3DS is doing great, gathering dozens and dozens of great games, and probably makes a tidy profit margin too. They did a wonderful job pivoting the console; people pretty quickly lost interest in the 3D aspect, but there was no reason they had to market the console on those merits to begin with, so as far as I can tell they've mostly de-emphasized that aspect of the device (and nobody I know even uses it!)
It's also cheap enough that even as the Vita does finally pick up sales and actual games (and it's happening, finally), it probably won't hurt the 3DS' sales -- their game lists seem more mutually exclusive than not and if someone can afford a Vita, they probably already have a 3DS if they ever wanted one.
The Vita is really its own interesting story of a console with (initially) almost no games -- a lot of more minor and independent developers have found that they can get great sales on the Vita since the market is much less saturated. Amazingly, a few months ago, the top selling Vita game was actually a rather niche title that was released with no prior announcement on the e-shop and no marketing whatsoever. I kind of wonder if the Wii U will have a year or two (or ten??) of the same kind of thing -- it definitely could be an interesting platform for indie devs.
It's true, they've pretty much owned portable gaming ever since the original Game Boy. But the problem they have there is that the portable gaming market is undergoing a huge shift from being about dedicated devices to being just another feature on smartphones. The 3DS' real competition isn't the Vita, in other words, it's the iPhone. And there's not a lot of evidence that Nintendo has a strategy to deal with this sea change.
Honestly, i could not disagree with you more. Here's why.
Games that can be played on an iphone/android can almost always be played on a 3ds/vita. Games that can be played on a 3ds/vita can almost never be played on an iphone/android. Is the mobile phone market exploding? Absolutely, but that doesnt mean its taking away from the mobile console market. Frankly it never will. They are two different mediums, there is some overlap, but very little.
This mainly comes down to controls. Because phones are primarily limited to touch screens, so is the kind of games you can effectively play on them.
Phones are great for casual games, but move to anything that require even the smallest amount of control and they start failing bad.
It's not about the controller, it's about software quality.
"The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks" and "Kirby: Canvas Curse" are Nintendo DS games that are using touch controls for about 99% of the the game. From a hardware perspective, there's nothing stopping a developer to create a game as good for iOS or Android.
And yet, imho, there are none. I've tried out about 2k iOS games in the past 5 years. There are about 10 or so that are pretty good (Carcasonne, Real Racing 2, Sword & Sworcery, Orbital, Cut the Rope, Dark Nebula, Beat Sneak Bandit, Hundreds, Infinity Blade, The Room, Horn, Ridiculous Fishing, Tiny Wings), but _none_ of them really reach the breadth and artfulness of Super Mario 3D Land, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 7 or Spirit Tracks. They're not even in the same league.
It will be really interesting to see, if Apple can emulate the Nintendo 3DS experience with a bolt on controller for the iPhone. And if the game developers are willing to compete in a much smaller market of iPhone users who actually have, and are willing to carry the controller with them. And games that, go both ways, won't be able to compete with games designed for D-pad + buttons control.
You think? I connect controllers to my Android devices on occasion, it works beautifully. Still I don't do it that often unless I'm sitting at home. That's been an option for Android users for years, I just don't see it taking off unless the controller is built into the device.
On public transit, or an airplane, I tend to use my 3DS for gaming.
There are some that are... acceptable. But you're right.
The fact that Apple has announced APIs for game controllers on iOS means that this will change with iOS 7, and that could be a big problem for Nintendo.
That seems to be a de-facto-standard away from being solved though. Someone, or some collection of someones, are going to hit on a controller and/or case and/or variant device that establishes some set of inputs that clicks with the market. [1]
And developers will design for said standard and that will be that.
That seems much easier (if not entirely inevitable) than Nintendo discovering some way to halt and/or reverse the trend away from dedicated gaming devices.
[1] a standard along the lines of the modern console: "dual analog sticks, d-pad, shoulder buttons, four face buttons"; or stand-up arcade fighter's: "analog stick + 6 buttons", etc. It doesn't have to be one-true-piece of hardware, just a general arrangement of inputs that developers can design for.
I don't think lack of hardware or standards here is the issue. It's still an open question as to whether those same people who buy mobile games would walk around with a controller+phone in their pocket/purse.
The question isn't whether happy touch-gamers would buy these controller cases in bulk. The question is: should these cases exist and get developer support, how many 3DS and Vita gamers would continue paying a premium for their dedicated devices and software libraries?
Android and iOS already "have" the larger slice of the market. (The "touch gaming" slice) My point is that they're a very short step away from essentially taking "all" of it. (Not literally all -- focused devices may still live on -- but enough that Sony and Nintendo's current model can't sustain itself.)
Also, I think you're "off" on the size estimate.
Extend a hypothetical mobi-style battery case an inch-and-a-half on the 'head' and 'chin' of an iPhone. D-pad on the left, some buttons on the right -- maybe even shoulder buttons if you're feeling saucy.
The result is still pocketable and smaller than a Vita or 3DS. (Similarly for any number of popular Android phones -- though phones with 5" screens would push the arrangement directly into Vita-ish dimensions.)
Stand-alone controllers are an important part, but they'd be something that provides consistency on the TV-screen side, with things like GameStick, Ouya and/or Apple's rumored AppleTV gamepad play.
I've still yet to play a smartphone game half as deep as any of the games I played on the original Game Boy as a kid. Modern smartphone games are really not that far removed from Snake on the early Nokia phones: Simple time wasters you play for a few minutes during lunch break or while waiting for a friend, distractions to fill the little gaps in life, only now, they all have slot machines taped onto their sides. The thing is, Nintendo's portables were never competing in this market in the first place. It's not like the original iPhone came out and regular people everywhere said "oh wow, now I don't have to lug a DS around everywhere!" When did you ever seen someone over the age of 10 waiting on the sidewalk with their face buried in a Game Boy?
The actual "on the go" use for a handheld is for people that are regularly stuck in transportation for long periods of time -- mostly children in the US, but public transportation is more common elsewhere. If you were going to be stuck in a car or other vehicle for hours on a trip, you'd probably want something more involving than Angry Birds to occupy your time. You simply can't offer that kind of gameplay experience with just a touch screen (with the possible exception of menu-driven games like RPGs, which I'm surprised there aren't more of on smartphones... probably because it's harder to make a good RPG than it is to lock a tired old flash game in a Vegas casino for a few hours and drape a nice coat of fur over whatever stumbles out...), and the moment you bolt a more game-friendly input device onto a phone, it stops being a fashion accessory and becomes a "toy" that no adult wants to be seen carrying around in public (I'm not immune to this effect, but it's still ironic since smartphones are mostly glorified toys in the same way that expensive cars are)
The other main use (and the way I've enjoyed Nintendo consoles for years) is for lounging around the house. There's something really nice about curling up in bed or on the couch on a lazy day and getting lost in Animal Crossing or whatever for an hour or so. Or, uh, taking it into the bathroom and spending more time than you expected to...
What I'm getting at is that the main competitor for Nintendo's handhelds is actually the iPad: Something you can pick up at home, hop right into a game/web browser/whatever without tedious load times or a serious commitment, and put away at a moment's notice: just close the lid/hit the lock button and it'll all be waiting for you when you feel like it. Only, they aren't really competitors, because people don't surf the web and watch videos on their handhelds, and they don't sit down with their iPads for hours playing Fire Emblem. Neither has the right form factor or input method for the other use case, so neither can completely replace the other.
Nintendo and to a lesser extent Sony are the only ones that seem to get the appeal of this kind of experience, so I'll keep buying their handhelds 'til they stop making them. As will a lot of other people who grew up with various iterations of the Game Boy. Really, my only complaint is that their platforms aren't more open to indie developers, though I get why they don't want to harm the reputation of their consoles with an app store free-for-all. At least Sony seems to be moving in the right direction on that front.
The 3DS has only been out for a couple years, and sales are still rising -- I don't feel like you can really compare it to a console whose entire lifespan has already passed.
It might be better to compare the N64 to other consoles of the time, like the Playstation.
Got my 3ds about 2 months ago and I absolutely love the 3d aspect. To my eyes the 3d view is beautiful to view/play and is oddly nostalgic (it reminds me of a Viewmaster).
(Okay, I'm ignoring a few things, like cost. But no one gives a hoot about a zillion pentagons per second. They care about fun games. If those zillion pentagons make the game more fun, then win.)
It looks like they have plenty of cash in the bank as well as zero debt.
A Wii U is also on my list. I have no interest in Xbox One or Playstation 4. Almost all the games are multiplatform now and many are now coming to Steam. There are also so many games coming out and the fact I have limited time to go around I'm limiting my options this generation to Nintendo and Steam. That gives me plenty of gaming. I don't need to play everything, but I do need to play Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.
Does Nintendo really need to bother competing with Sony and MSFT? Especially with almost all games being multiplatform now. Isn't the main reason to buy a console for the exclusives and content it provides?
I wish Wii U was as open as the Ouya. It's cool, though, that they put that JS library up for getting button-mapping in-browser from the control pad.
I don't own a Wii U, either. It's way too expensive and I don't find any of the titles compelling. That, and when I played with one at Toys R Us I found the controller cheap to hold.
First off, it always sold everything at a per-product profit from day one. Games, consoles, everything. That made it hard for them to lose money unless they failed to cover development costs by selling too few consoles, for example.
Second, they had the only portable gaming system that was extremely popular worldwide and just as profitable.
Third, they had a huge 1st party game lineup that always brought a lot of fans.
Fourth, they were able to make a different kind of game than the rest of the industry. Generally gameplay and character based games instead of visual appeal / physics based games like many of the traditional major AAA games. This dramatically lowered their production costs. Add to that the lure of motion controls during the glory years of the Wii.
Compare, for example, titles such as Halo 3 or Call of Duty: MW2 vs Super Smash Brothers Brawl or New Super Mario Bros Wii. Halo 3 sold something like 12 million copies and MW2 sold about 22 million. Those are impressive numbers, pushing gross revenue up near the billion dollar range. However, these are also very expensive games to produce, due to all the art assets, voice acting, the complexity of the game, and so forth. In contrast Brawl sold about 12 million copies and New SMB Wii sold about 28 million. But what's the development budget on Smash Bros. or even New SMB Wii in comparison? They don't have the same high-def 3D rendered immersive, interactive environment requirements as a modern AAA FPS or adventure game, they have a pitiful amount of voice acting, and typically so little that internationalization is comparatively trivial, and they just aren't as complicated of games overall.
Nintendo was able to sell its quirky little gameplay centric games and earn AAA revenue on the back of fractional development costs compared to most AAA titles. That translated into, as they say, "printing money".
But there are some problems. People stopped buying Wiis and playing Wii games. So Nintendo felt they needed to come out with a new console to try to deal with the competition. Unfortunately, the Wii-U isn't a coherent or inspired design, it's just designed by a committee who has no conception of what's happening in gaming right now. The result is a sort of weird little HD Wii with a questionably useful tablet controller.
Meanwhile, the rest of the gaming industry has been changing a great deal. Digital distribution has become not just a part of the industry but has gained enough momentum to seem like it will be the future core of the industry. And partly because of that indie games have had a renaissance. Additionally, smartphones and tablets have inserted themselves as pillars of the mobile gaming market. And both Microsoft and Sony have produced better motion control hardware schemes than Nintendo has managed to develop.
Nintendo is now being threatened from every side. Its motion control advantage is now lost. Its quirky gameplay centric advantage is now under assault by a veritable army of indie game devs, some of whom can finance their games on kickstarter and sell them for $10 or less through digital channels. Its mobile gaming systems are finding it tough to compete with more advanced tablets and smartphones with burgeoning game libraries. And its persistent weakness in online communities and underlying game system OS technology has started to take its toll in an era where everyone is more connected than ever.
Almost nobody is seriously excited about the potential of the Wii-U hardware, it's boring and largely already obsoleted by other console hardware and by the Xbox One and PS4 hardware. Pretty much the only thing keeping Nintendo alive is their 1st party titles, but how much will that encourage people to buy into their console hardware, potentially at the cost of not being able to buy an iPad or either of the other 2 new consoles coming out this year?
The Wii-U has already had a huge price drop since launch about half a year ago and sales are still anemic, that's not a good sign considering that sales are unlikely to be better 6 months from now when the xbox and playstation next gen consoles are on the market, let alone after the next ipad rev. hits. If they were smart they'd transition into a software only company.
Edit: to add to this, I used to own a Wii (though I sold it after I realized I hadn't even bothered to turn it on for about a year), and I've used the Wii-U extensively. I love some of the games for the Wii-U but I'm not sure they have enough pull to get many gamers to buy a whole new console. Also, the Wii-U software is a nightmare. For a device that is entirely based on solid state storage it takes a remarkably long time to do anything. Also, the very first update for the console took an hour (literally, a full hour, regardless of internet connection speed). And the battery life on the gamepad is decidedly underwhelming, as is the lack of multi-touch. Overall these aren't good selling points to the average consumer, or even to the Nintendo enthusiast.
>The Wii-U has already had a huge price drop since launch about half a year ago and sales are still anemic, that's not a good sign considering that sales are unlikely to be better 6 months from now when the xbox and playstation next gen consoles are on the market, let alone after the next ipad rev. hits. If they were smart they'd transition into a software only company.
> Generally gameplay and character based games
> instead of visual appeal / physics based games
> like many of the traditional major AAA games.
> This dramatically lowered their production costs.
Are we sure this is true?
Refined gameplay is the result of many, many, many extra person-hours (and therefore money) of iteration, testing, refinement, and so forth.
It's one of the reasons (certainly not the only reason) there's (for example) a flagship Zelda game every 5+ years, not every single year like Madden 2013 or Call Of Medal Of Honorable Black Splinter Ops.
Is this a joke? Nintendo has just been lucky ONCE with the Wii, and you call that "doing so well" for 2 decades? Let's not forget they lost the console supremacy with the N64. That the Gamecube was a dead console when it came out. The only reason Nintendo is still alive nowadays is because of their portable consoles business. That's where they go unchallenged. And no, Sony is not very successful in that field, except in a few markets (the PSP(first one) did very well in Japan, and is still going on strong).
Their base "will always be there" is exactly the kind of statement that brought Sony down in the last generation. They thought they could sell PS3 at the price they wanted. Nintendo made the same mistake with the 3DS, by pricing it very high at launch timing and facing extremely disappointing sales until they cut the price and released more games for the system. It was one of the worst Nintendo launches EVER.
Even if the games come on WiiU, it's too late for Nintendo. There will be fantastic-looking games for the PS4 (and XBox one) which will catch the attention of gamers for a while. And the WiiU did not repeat the same thing as the Wii in the first place: most people dont "get" the concept, because it's not a very cool concept in the first place.
Another reason the WiiU is dead is that they have no 3rd party developer support. There's no games for it because most developers are working for other systems already. They don't bet on the WiiU. It will be obsolete in no time.
just read the post. didn't see one instance of "home console". I even control-f'd it. However, you specifically mentioned the 3DS in it, which means that you were considering the 3DS to be a console, at that time.
Doesn't this fit the definition of moving the goalposts? [1]
So does Playdead
So does Turn 10 Studios
So does BioWare
So does Bethesda
So does Dice
So does Team Meat
I could actually go on for a bit but I think I make my point that having Nintendo make good games consistently doesn't compare to a more open platform that has dozens of developers many of who consistently put out excellent games.
Nintendo is far behind in terms of hardware and completely relied on their blue ocean strategy to carry them last time. They tried again and it’s not looking too good. Sales will pick up I'm sure when games actually come out but between half the people I know thinking it’s a peripheral and it having to actually compete because people are not going crazy over a gimmick I don’t think its going to do well this generation.
> So does Playdead So does Turn 10 Studios So does BioWare So does Bethesda So does Dice So does Team Meat
Nintendo has made more great games in the last 10 years than all the above companies combined have made in their lifetimes. It's pretty disingenuous to dismiss them so lackadaisically.
Nintendo put themselves in a tough spot, with dwindling Wii sales they were left with the choice of having no Console choice or having one with no games(very few). It can be argued which is the better option, obviously both suck.
I do not consider Nintendo in trouble, there base(as has been proven time and time again) will always be there(mainly because they stick to there guns, for better or worse). Point & case of this is the 3DS, when this was release for a good 7-8 months it was considered a horrible console, with its best game being a remake of "The Legend of Zelda OOT"(arguably). Look at it now it is considered to be the best running console available. Granted it some good games in this 7-8 month period, but not much.
My point is, when it comes down to it, games sell consoles, and the WiiU has no games, at all really. Once they come, and they will, the console will be in at least fine shape. I personally have not bought one, but it is on my list above both the xbox1 and the ps4.
My 2 cents...