Hey guys, this is Austin.

The Wii U was the biggest flop in Nintendo history.

Now sure, they had weird experiments like the Virtual Boy,

but coming off of the massively successful Wii,

there was a real sense that Nintendo could do no wrong.

And yet, we have this.

Reason number one, is a simple one.

The name was just not a good idea.

Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii U

was not a bad console, but a lot of people

first of all didn't even realize

that it was even a separate console by itself.

Lots and lots of people just thought

that it was a tablet add-on for the original Wii.

And I mean, with ads like this, can you blame them?

- [Boy] And did we mention, togetherness?

- Just check out the simulation.

- Whoa!

- Don't get me wrong, a ton of people made fun

of the name of the original Wii,

at least until it was in basically every living room

on the face of the planet.

The problem is that six years after the launch

of the original Wii, Nintendo brought this out

and a lot of people just asked,

what exactly was it?

It is a big problem, when tons of people don't realize

that your shiny brand new console,

is an actual shiny new console,

not some add-on for the original Wii.

Especially when you consider,

that after 100 million sales of the original Wii

and merely 13 million with the Wii U,

Nintendo had a major branding problem,

that honestly could have been solved

by just calling this the Wii 2, or you know, the Wii

Want You To Buy Our Console Edition.

Reason number two why the Wii U was sales challenged

had to do with the tablet that served

as it's controller, the GamePad.

Now it's easy to forget that back in 2012,

tablets were touted as the next big thing.

Unfortunately, what was not the next big thing,

was a giant unwieldy tablet that was completely useless

if it was not connected to its base station.

That's the beauty of a console like the Switch.

It has pretty much none of the same down sides

as the Wii U, so you're going to be getting

a more powerful system, that's going to be a lot smaller,

a lot more portable, and to top it all off,

you can take it with you anywhere.

As opposed to the Wii U where,

you can take this anywhere,

as long as this is no more than 20-25 feet away.

With the Wii U, the GamePad relied

on a local wireless connection.

Now while that was fine for the most part,

get too far away and it completely falls apart.

However, once you're actually close to the Wii U console

it does work pretty well.

In theory, you could never plug this into a TV,

and just use the GamePad for all of your game play.

At launch, the GamePad also had another problem.

Not very good battery life.

So the first models would last somewhere in the neighborhood

of three to three and a half hours on a charge

which really isn't great for a controller.

Thankfully later models did bump that up to something

closer to six to seven, but if you're one of those

early adopters of the Wii U, you had better not

stay too far from a charger with this guy.

Now this might sound like a little bit of a nitpick,

but one of the issues, especially with games like

Super Smash Bros., is that while

this is always gonna be one of your controllers,

you can only ever have one GamePad paired

with the Wii U at the same time.

Meaning that if everyone comes over

for a game of Smash Bros., someone's always

gonna get stuck with the giant controller.

However, don't get me wrong,

this is not all bad by any means.

So first of all, the idea that this has a lot

of interesting tech that was legitimately new

for the time is cool.

Stuff like NFC support for Amiibos,

which would come a little bit later,

really was the first time that this

was ever shown in a Nintendo console.

And the idea that you do have a camera,

you do have decent controls,

even though it's a little bit big,

a touch screen, there's a lot to like here.

But, this was a major hurdle for the Wii U to overcome

and a lot of people just straight up thought

that it was an accessory for the original Wii.

Kinda hard to get over that one.

- Hot buttered popcorn, that's a deal!

- Before we move on, I wanna

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So what you're looking at right now

is being shot on a Mevo camera.

It's basically the next best thing to having your own Ken.

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you can use that to be able to pan around the shot,

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is going to be completely digital thanks to that 4K sensor.

What makes the Mevo unique, is that this single camera

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including YouTube, Facebook, as well as Periscope.

What's cool is, because it's so small

and it does have a tripod mount in the box,

you can easily set this up on the go.

So in addition to being able to work over wifi,

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and use it over LTE to livestream

something like a concert, or in my case,

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One of my favorite parts really is how the app works.

So really simply I can say, zoom out on the shot.

I can tap on my face, I can tap on the screen,

I can sort of punch in, punch out,

there's really so many different options

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So if you wanna up your livestream game,

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Anyway, huge shout out to Mevo for sponsoring this video.

- Here's why we need Wii U.

Reason number three has to do with power.

It's easy to forget, but the Wii U actually came out

only a year before the Xbox One and the PS4.

Where the Wii was essentially just a faster GameCube,

the Wii U did some legitimately interesting stuff.

Of course, one of biggest leaps, was the leap to HD,

something that the Xbox 360 beat it to by like seven years.

However there was more to it than just that.

As opposed to the anemic single core CPU

that was found in both the GameCube and the Wii,

instead the Wii U stepped all the way up

to a triple core PowerPC processor.

Although, this was hardly cutting edge, even back in 2012.

Nintendo also included a dual AMD GPU set up.

Well, technically at least.

So in addition to the standard GPU,

which is what the Wii U uses to run its normal games,

you're also going to be getting a copy of the Wii GPU.

Now this is for backwards compatibility,

and it does work really well here.

Although interestingly, you actually can unlock

GameCube backwards compatibility as well,

although that is definitely not going to be fully supported.

At least, if you ask Nintendo.

With two gigs of RAM, the Wii U does have

a healthy advantage over Xbox 360 as well as the PS3,

and in a lot of ways, the Wii U is

going to be more powerful.

Unfortunately, the Wii U came out in 2012,

and again, being only a year away

from both the Xbox One and PS4 meant

that this really had a difficult time competing

with the current generation of consoles.

Just like the Wii, it had a lot of interesting capabilities,

but high performance definitely wasn't one of them.

Reason number four has to do with price.

So when the Wii U first came out there were two models.

First of all, a basic white version

which looks very, very similar to the original Wii,

and then there's the black deluxe edition,

which was a little bit more expensive,

and at least didn't look quite so much

like the console that it was replacing.

(clears throat)

Considering that you were getting a console

with roughly the same power as the outgoing

Xbox 360 and PS3, prices weren't exactly cheap.

So the basic model came with only eight gigabytes

of storage for $300, and even stepping up

to the deluxe model would still only get you 32 gigs

of storage at a $350 price tag.

Now to be fair, it wasn't all bad from the start.

The first couple months of the Wii U being on sale,

Nintendo sold over three million units.

Unfortunately after that, well sales kinda fell

off of a cliff, and they really never recovered.

Due to the high cost of the GamePad which had

to be included with every single Wii U,

Nintendo really didn't have a lot of options

to be able to boost the lagging sales.

So after about a year, they were able

to drop the price on the deluxe model

from $350 to $300, which did make an effect,

but at the end of the day, there really was not a lot

of room for them to do anything besides hope that people

would finally buy this misunderstood, wonderful console.

Now if that was the only problem with the Wii U,

they probably would have been just fine.

However, with problems quickly mounting,

the Wii U having only been on sale for less than a year,

the real challengers were coming up very quickly.

PS4 and Xbox One, as you might imagine,

very quickly outsold the Wii U, and never looked back.

That brings us to reason number five,

why the Wii U was a failure.

Third party support, or more specifically

the almost complete lack thereof.

Now let's be real, the original Wii did have a lot

of third party games, the problem was,

most of them were complete garbage.

(marching music)

However, with a hundred million consoles in the wild,

a lot of developers, in fact, pretty much all developers

really didn't have a lot of choice,

you had to make a Wii game.

Now when it comes to the Wii U,

they didn't really have that constraint,

which meant that they really didn't have

to actually make Wii U games, and so, they didn't.

To be fair, there were some third party games

on the Wii U, most specifically Ubisoft

actually did support it for the first few years.

However, the issue was, is that with so few consoles

in the wild, and such a huge disparity

between the performance of the Wii U

and the brand new Xbox One and PS4,

it was very difficult for developers

to justify spending the time and money

to bring an actually decent Wii U game to the platform.

Making things more complicated

was the promise of the GamePad.

Of course, most first parties didn't take great advantage

of this, so when it comes to third party support,