Nintendo of America’s former president Reggie Fils-Aimé has addressed the failure of Wii U, which he blamed on the slower-than-expected launch of new Smash Bros., Mario Kart and Splatoon exclusives, as well as competition from Xbox and PlayStation.
Speaking during a Q&A event at the NYU Game Center, Fils-Aimé admitted that the company had been forced to pivot as fast as possible when it became clear the Wii U was on “life support” — removing one of the two versions of the console on the market, while launching collectible NES and SNES microconsoles over consecutive years to prop up hardware sales.
When discussing Wii U, Fils-Aimé began by asking the audience how many had bought a Wii U. When a large percentage seemed to raise their hands, Fils-Aimé joked that it was a “shocking” response. “Wii U was the second worst performing platform for Nintendo,” he noted. “Second only to the Virtual Boy.”
“When we were developing the Wii U, we were convinced that the combination of what I call the ’10-foot experience’ — your TV 10 foot away, and a 10-inch experience having some sort of gameplay on the GamePad… was a big idea,” he continued. “We believed that it would create opportunities for different types of gameplay, where you could be playing what’s happening on the big screen together, like in Mario Kart, or you could play a different type of game where one person is having a slightly different experience than everyone else.
“We began creating content with that idea and the output was NintendoLand,” Fils-Aimé said, referencing the mini-game collection that arrived alongside the Wii U itself. “We thought it could be the equivalent of Wii Sports for that generation. And I played it, I didn’t stand up and say, ‘Boy, this software isn’t working for me,’ but you get that little itch in the back of your neck that says, ‘Ehh… this isn’t Wii Sports.’
“We launch, we actually did well in our first year, but then as players were looking at the next generation of Sony and Microsoft [consoles], our sales really stalled,” Fils-Aimé continued. “The other thing that happened was the pace of new products we had seen on paper did not materialize on the timetable that we needed. So the team was working on a new Smash Bros., Mario Kart, Splatoon — which has become a fantastic franchise for Nintendo — but the games didn’t come out fast enough. And after the second year, it was clear that we were not going to have the success we needed to.”
“That’s when the commercial executive starts really pushing an agenda on how we need to course correct,” he recalled, noting two steps he took that firstly appeased retailers seeking a simpler offering, and then customers seeking more games for the console.
“We had launched with two different SKUs [essentially, two versions of the same product], one had more memory than the other,” he continued. “The one with less memory was white, the other SKU was black. I killed the white SKU because the volume wasn’t there to sustain it. In order to keep our retail partners, we needed to have a velocity that made sense. We [also] focused on some games that were coming digitally, and this was really the beginning of a deep relationship with independent developers that would find success on that platform, and then on Nintendo Switch. So we did a series of commercial efforts to try and sustain as much momentum as we had.
“In two successive years, we launched those micro legacy devices… the small NES and then following year, the small SNES,” Fils-Aimé also noted. “We did that to sustain our business, because we needed something to sell at volume, come the holiday season. So it was a series of commercial ideas, knowing full well that the Wii U was on life support.”
Nintendo Series Tier List
Nintendo Series Tier List
Thankfully for Nintendo, planning was already well underway for a successor console that would evolve the concept of the Wii U’s GamePad and make it the core of the console — an idea that would eventually launch in 2017 as Nintendo Switch, turning the company’s fortunes around in dramatic fashion.
“Now jump to March 2016,” Fils-Aimé said. “I’m called to Japan for a meeting, and I argued with [former Nintendo president] Mr Iwata because I’d lined up activity for my birthday. He was adamant on the days that he wanted me in Kyoto, and I would have celebrated my birthday in Kyoto.”
“In the end there were two reasons for this meeting,” Fils-Aimé revealed. “The first is, that’s when he told me his cancer was back. At that point, we all believed he had beaten his cancer, but he wanted to tell me face-to-face that his cancer was back. And we talked about that for like an hour. And then he, like, flipped the switch. Now we need to talk about the future. And it was in that meeting that we did the launch planning for the Nintendo Switch. The software that would come out, the pricing, how we would launch it, how we would think about it. And we ended up launching the Switch the following March.”
“When you’ve got a business in trouble, you know,” Fils-Aimé concluded. “And when you know, you need to take decisive action in order to manage the situation, manage your key constituents, whether its retailers or consumers, and then find the solution that would deliver success downstream. And for Nintendo, that solution was the Switch, that leveraged the insight we had about a 10-foot experience and a 10-inch experience, but the execution was different.”
Wii U ultimately sold 13.56 million units in just over four years, before its production ceased. As of December 31 last year, Switch was now on 155.37 million units and still counting. Switch 2, meanwhile, has sold 17.37 million units in seven months.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
