Shigeru Miyamoto knows why Nintendo’s Wii U failed

Shigeru Miyamoto is the creator of a number of iconic Nintendo games, he has brought us Mario, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, The Legend of Zelda and more. With over 35 years of experience, Miyamoto knows a thing or two about Nintendo and the consoles his games are being played on.

When it comes to the Wii U Miyamoto has a couple of ideas on why it didn't take off like some of their consoles in the past. Nintendo has always been a fan of innovation, you can see this in the evolution of their controllers.

This innovation can lead to big hits and others can lead to a fiasco.

Miyamoto believes that one of Wii U's points of failure was the confusion over the console, "I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn't understand the system." You could even go as far to extend that statement to cover the individuals who didn't market the console correctly who work at Nintendo.

The game designer/creator went on to say that the price of the Wii U did not work in its favor, "Unfortunately with our latest system, the Wii U, the price point was one that ended up getting a little higher than we wanted." Nintendo is striving to "create a system that is both unique and affordable," something that could possibly be achieved with their next console.

The Wii U had features that were new and innovative, the GamePad being a major source of innovation. The moment the Nintendo released the console was unfortunate, the marketplace for tablets was evolving.

"I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them."

The NX, Nintendo's next console project, will be on par with their previous consoles and the search for innovation — hopefully this time around it won't turn out like the Wii U.

"So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we're constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they're not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we're hoping that next time it will be a very big hit."

[NPR]