Wii U Was a “Failure Forward” Because It Led to the Switch

Nintendo are flying high with the Switch right now, a console that just won’t stop selling no matter what market you look at, and it’s clear that the company has recovered from its not-too-distant abysmal failures spectacularly. Said abysmal failures mostly came from the Wii U, a console that went wrong in more ways than one, and performed extremely poorly on the market to boot.

But according to the now-retired former Nintendo of America president, it was – to some extent – a necessary failure. Speaking in a lecture at Cornell University (summarized by ResetEra user Theorymon), Reggie bluntly called the Wii U a failure, but tagged it as a “failure forward”, because it was what led to the immensely successful Switch.

This isn’t the first time the former Nintendo man has voiced this opinion. A couple years back, before the launch of the Switch, he described the Wii U as “a necessary step in order to get to Nintendo Switch.” It’s easy to see what he means by it, too, because one look at the Switch is enough to tell you that with it, Nintendo refined and improved a lot of the half-formed ideas they originally executed with the Wii U.

The Switch has, of course, been selling gangbusters for Nintendo, which is the opposite of what the Wii U did. It has crossed 15 million units sold in North America, 10 million in Europe, and at last count, its worldwide shipments stood at over 36 million.