The Wii U is a massive failure, having sold less than 14 million units worldwide, having seen a mass exodus of third party game support, with Nintendo left scrambling alone to prop up the system with increasingly rushed ports. The Wii U almost killed Nintendo by wiping out the brand cachet they had built up in the last few years with the Wii, and that they have finally begun to regain this year- but Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto thinks that even though it didn’t work out, it was an important step. And hopefully, he says, people will eventually look back on it as that.
“I hope people will continue to recognize the areas where Nintendo has taken that first step,” Miyamoto said in an interview with The Verge. “And hopefully someday people will look back on the Wii U and think ‘Oh wow, I remember when Nintendo did that, and now look at what’s come of that.’”
The upcoming, exciting looking Nintendo Switch undoubtedly shares a lot of its DNA with the Wii U, so it is hard to deny that the Wii U, with all of its troubles and failures, may have been an important system for Nintendo. Whether its legacy can be leveraged into something positive with the Switch remains to be seen.