Author’s Note: This is a copy/paste of another article I’ve written that I was able to salvage from our soon to be defuncted Disqus channel by September 1st. A couple of things may be a bit dated, but the main topic of this article is still relevant to this very day because one of our former contributors still bangs it into both his friends and his followers’ heads once in a while in his weekly podcasts whenever some Switch-related news comes out. So please, enjoy.
The Nintendo Switch is killing it in its 2-year run sales wise, and it’s gotten various people talking about it. However, there’s been a few individuals, as well as from our own group, who aren’t convinced that the Switch is all that great and believe that the Wii U should’ve gotten that attention in the first place (since the Switch is essentially a revised Wii U). You know what this form of jealousy reminds me of? The Nintendo Wii days.
When the Wii first came out and became an international seller, hardcore Nintendo fans were shunning it left and right for trying to appeal to casual audiences by dumbing down intense gameplay from long-running franchises with motion controls to make them more accessible. They also didn’t like the shovelware third-party games flooding its library nor the graphically inferior ports of Triple A titles like Dead Rising. These hardcore fans treated the Wii’s predecessor, the Nintendo GameCube, as the last great console the company has made for them, despite being the whipping boy for gaming journalists at the time.
Both the Wii and the Switch share similar parallels with one another:
– Both are seen as revolutionary consoles
– Both appeal to the casual market
– Both use motion control technology
– Both are shunned by the hardcore crowd
– Both have ports of last-gen games
You can list out any more similarities I’ve missed out in the comments section below.
It appears that like GCN owners with the Wii, Wii U owners are only merely jealous of the Switch’s success because of its mass appeal, whereas meanwhile poor marketing, the transition to HD, the 2011 Japanese earthquake, and game journalist/third-party sabotaging led the Wii U into being the worst-selling Nintendo console in the 8th gen. I get it and understand how you’re feeling. I wish the Wii U was a more popular console too, but it’s all in the past now, and it’s time to let it go and accept that the Switch has won the audience’s favor in spite of journalists trying to sabotage it prior to it release and putting the PS4 into a corner. And with a new gen Pokémon game coming to a Nintendo console for the first time later on, who knows how many units the Switch will sell before the end of 2019.
VG Editorials 