"Wii U Sucks"
Why was the hate for history's greatest console so vitriolic?
Last week I posted an obituary for a console that had towered over all of its competition and was much-beloved by the wider core gaming community: Nintendo’s Wii U. If you are a regular reader of “On Shovelware,” you know that I made the exact same joke at the beginning of that obituary, and that in fact the Wii U was widely hated and panned by everyone aside from the most compulsive Nintendo fans.* But was it really so hated? I certainly remembered it that way. I decided to do a deep dive not into the history of the Wii U itself, but into the widespread internet hate it inspired. This hate has taken on herculean proportions in the public imagination. I spent the past week scrolling through old hardware reviews, reddit threads, and even the occasional contemporary history and what I found was far more nuanced than I had remembered.
A quick google search for the phrase “Wii U Sucks” brings back 6390 results, including a youtube video with 30,000 views creatively titled “Wii U Sucks so bad, you just don’t know! Epic Fail” and an article for a website called Geeky Gadgets titled “The Wii U Sucks and Nintendo blames Tablets” (who will speak for the tablets?!). This might sound like a lot, and it is. Anything that inspires six thousand three hundred and ninety people or organisations to specifically call it out for its suckiness must be widely disliked. But hold on. A similar google search for the phrase “PS4 Sucks” brings about 12,500 results, and a search for “XBone Sucks” generates a whopping 27,400 results. It’s certainly possible that this is due to the fact that the PS4 and XBox One both outsold the Wii U by tens of millions of units, but console sales don’t seem to correlate to the amount of suckses** in a google search result. The PS4, with it’s 12,500 angry detractors, sold over 110 million units, while the XBox and it’s far more numerous legion of haters has only sold about 50 million units.
So if there are so many more search results proclaiming the suckage of the Wii U’s competitors, why do we primarily remember the Wii U for the hate it received?
The Wii U’s roll out was an unmitigated disaster. It was announced confusingly in April, 2011 as a thing that many mistook for a controller, and then shown at E3 to little fanfare. The reveal inspired so little confidence amongst investors that Nintendo’s stock fell 10% in two days. The investors were right, and while sales were fine when the Wii U released in November 2012, sales had dropped by 50% over the next six months. As noted before, the Wii U was a financial disaster, moving just more than a quarter of the units of its closest competitor, and this certainly played a role in the dominance of the narrative that the Wii U was sucky hardware.
We all remember the reviews of the Wii U. They dumped on a controller/tablet/hybrid thing that nobody had asked for or wanted, right? Wrong. IGN actually posted two different reviews of the Wii U, the first granting it a respectable 7.6 (the XBox One received a 7.8). That first review reads ironically nowadays given what we now know about the Wii U’s total lack of success, saying that “despite some growing pains, Nintendo has taken a huge step in the right direction. This is a console in its infancy, with lots of room to mature.” The Wii U’s predecessor, the Wii, was much-maligned by the core gamers that Nintendo wanted to attract with the Wii U, but managed to sell more than 100 million units. Selling a tenth of the consoles its forebear did was hardly a step in the right direction. IGN’s second review is even warmer. “After peering at it with fresh eyes, it's obvious that this system has quietly transformed from being a good one into a great one;” the difference between good and great is so massive that they bumped the score up .4 points to an 8.0.
The comments, however, tell a different story. Although the comment section underneath the first review wasn’t quite as overwhelmingly negative as I expected, it’s still jarring how angry the Wii U’s detractors were. IGN’s readers mostly thought of each other as idiots, as illustrated by the number of people who called each other idiots in this comment thread. One commenter told us that “Nintendo is looking like it's going to be the baby of the consoles once again with Wii U,” and another mused that they “don't know why people continue to buy into Nintendo's BS. Case in point, ‘nothing that takes advantage of the gamepad exists YET, but it's only a matter of time until it does.’ Oh really? So what kind of innovative things did the waggle controller do for the Wii?”
Two years later the comments were even more negative, although truncated. There were only six comments underneath IGN’s second review, and aside from a short response consisting of “nice” by a user named Shillingfornintendo, all of the comments were negative. A different user summed up the thread’s thoughts about bumping up the Wii U’s score with a different one-word comment that just said “trash.”
Reddit threads took a similar turn over the years. In a thread from 2013 called “Still No Wii U Love?” there were a handful of hold outs supporting the poor console, but most redditors had either fully embraced the hate or were giving armchair marketing advice. “They should have fucking called it the Wii 2,” according to one redditor who was rewarded for this insight with 220 upvotes. A number of others complained about the lack of games, including a few Wii U owners holding out for a new entry in the Metroid series.
A year later, when the wolves were at the door and yet Metroid still hadn’t arrived, redditors had more or less concluded as a group that the Wii U was a failed console. This viewpoint began to permeate coverage of the Wii U outside of comment threads from this point on as well. An article from Den of Geek compared Nintendo to Disney as a way of showing Nintendo how to bounce back for some reason***. Reddit commenters spent most of the thread about this article complaining that “there's a post every other day about the Wii U's poor sales” and discussing the total dominance of Microsoft and Sony over Nintendo. A handful of gamers, unable to resist an opportunity to extol the PC Master Race, explained that the only real way to game was with a decked out graphics processor and tons of RAM (or whatever you need for a good PC) and with a trusty Wii U by it’s side. Others were not so sure. “It's a great console for people who use PC as their main gaming system,” responded one redditor, “but it's only sub-par for people who use Xbone or PS4 as their main gaming system. PC gamers would be shitting on the WiiU as well if the games were multiplatform.”
By 2015 the narrative of the Wii U’s suckage had completely taken over. Although the image posted atop this five year old thread is now lost to the black hole of disappearing photobucket images in the wayback machine, we can assume that it was of a bunch of Wii U games. As u/homer_3 helpfully explained, “nearly a third of those games [weren’t] even released yet and some [were] pretty terrible. I own a Wii U and like it, but you need to make a better case.” One redditor calls out the post for propagating “the cheerleader effect,” something I’d never heard of. Another helpfully explains that “It's when a bunch of girls look way hotter because they're in a group while individual they may just be average looking. These boxes look nice but way better when all bunched together.” Reading this, I felt somewhat nostalgic for the old internet of the pre-woke era while I gagged a bit on the vomit burbling up in the back of my throat. This was 2015, the peak of Gamergate and a time when twelve year olds of all ages called SWAT teams to the houses of people who had fragged them in Call of Duty. Ironically, another gamer later chimed into this thread that “This lineup looks awesome to my inner 12 year old. Unfortunately, for Nintendo (and probably me) I am far removed from that age.”
And so it occurred to me. Is this what drove so much hate towards the Wii U? Was it just that a certain type of gamer had nothing but contempt for this little device and it’s mostly adorable family-friendly image? The Wii U had as much to do with anything “hardcore” as an elderly Catholic schoolmarm did, and this did not bode well at a time that the Wii’s massive user base had started gaming on their iPhones.
It’s hard to say what it was that made so many people upset at a device designed to do nothing but bring Mario-flavoured joy to millions. It could have been the lack of horsepower compared to its rivals, or the low sales, or the image that it was made for children. It could have been as simple as the fact that the Metroid game everyone wanted so much never came to be.
The thing that surprised me while researching this article wasn’t the hate for the Wii U; I remembered that vividly. But perhaps my memory of the overwhelming hatred was far more overwhelming than the hatred for the Wii U itself. For the most part people didn’t really care about the Wii U, as evidenced by the fact that “XBone Sucks” retrieves so many more search results than “Wii U sucks.” And out of those that did, a number were busy defending the downtrodden console. U/riskbreaker23 spoke for those forgotten Wii U fans in the 2014 thread: “Well, I think it depends on your measurement of success. Some of us out there just like to play games; I'm not too concerned about sales. In my mind, the wiiu has succeeded in entertaining me and that's the only measurement that matters to me. Hell, I've gotten more out of the wiiu in 6 months of owning one than I ever did the original Wii.”
*Me
**This was the best plural I could think of for the word “sucks”
***This Den of Geek article is worth reading because it’s the peak of the “Wii U Sucks And We’re Gonna Compare it to Stuff” genre that also includes articles like “The Wii U Probably is the Modern Day Dreamcast” and “Atari Founder is ‘Baffled’ by Wii U.” But comparing Disney to Nintendo is particularly nonsensical, like comparing Rolex to Apple. If you name a random piece of pop culture entertainment off the top of your head, there’s a really good chance that Disney owns it after the course of a decades-long buying spree. This includes everything from Mickey Mouse to ESPN to The Avengers. Nintendo, by contrast, owns… Nintendo IPs. This point is made in one of these reddit threads when a user points out that “[they] love [their] WiiU but damn…paying $350 for nintendo first party titles seems ridiculous.”