Is there any way back for Nintendo?

[The Curmudgeon]

As work days go, finishing up for a week and then being told you'd won a few hundred pound worth of shop vouchers is pretty much up there with the best of them.

So, loaded with this free money, I gave in to female persuasion and got Mrs C her Wii U.

And, you know..it is what we bought it for. A console that she can play the games that anyone who bought one bought it for - Mario and Zelda.

But where else to go from there? I have a next gen console and if I'm shopping for games I'm still all about the PS3. Yeah, you can buy Batman for the Wii but...ewww. Can you imagine it?

So Nintendo has, once again, got the worst console of the bunch, and one that 99% of gamers will turn their nose up at.

So what happened to Nintendo? Why can't they keep up with Sony and Microsoft? Why don't they have any games beyond the obvious Nintendo figureheads?

Sega were once big hitters on the console scene, and those days are long gone. Could the same thing happen to Nintendo?

[trashcanman]

All Nintendo has to do is start making games that aren't fucking Mario and Zelda that people want to play. It can't be all that hard. But the kiddie route has netted them tons of sales in the past so they are probably going to keep on keepin' on. People will buy it for Mario and Zelda and as long as that's true, they'll stay the course, even if it Sony and Microsoft are destroying them in terms of quality.

[Quillford]

Good topic. First things first. Batman Arkham on the Wii U - uses no motion control (as far as I am aware), just updated graphics and extra content. I know what you mean by Eww but I don't think it applies here. Maybe it is something you may want to look into man, I think you would appreciate the extra stuff being a man of your interests. As much as PS3 was definitely my favourite console of the last gen it wasn't the "best"... the Wii was. More sales in both consoles and titles than any other console in that generation. It is the best selling Nintendo home console ever. You can't ignore that. Not to mention the Hand Held Console that went along with it in that generation the DS is the best selling hand held of all time.
The PS3 was more "powerful", it had a few more titles and the online community was better (by that I mean it actually had one). But gamers hardcore and vanilla, non gamers and families bought more Wii's than PS3's and 360's. But let's not get bogged down with statistics. Nintendo have made some HUGE and very stupid mistakes with the Wii U. While I don't agree with the statement that Nintendo can't keep up with Sony or Microsoft - what I can say is that this console launch round they have come out on the bottom.
It's down to bad advertising (most people didn't know what a Wii U was and mistook it for an upgrade to the Wii like a slim line version or something) and of course power (people like to know they have the best. Nintendo did a pretty good job of announcing that the Wii U was going in a different direction to other consoles and therefore didn't need the power of a gaming PC. This wasn't received well). Aside from these fatal errors, the console is actually a banging machine, I think the "new" miiverse is the best community online genuinely. There are pages for all the games you like so you can talk to other fans and you have avatars that can meet and greet other friends. If everyone I knew had a Wii U I would never be off the thing. What let's the Wii U down currently is the lack of NEW exclusive IP's and lack of mainstream games. What comes out on both Xbox and PS4 does not always come out on Wii U - although this is not always the case, it is sometimes and on pretty big titles too.
Nintendo will not do a "sega". The idea is a little out there. Nothing that happened to Sega has happened to Wii U. Dreamcast failed completely. Too ahead of it's time. Wii U has struggled and is known to be behind it's time. But Wii U is cheaper than every other console (good marketing strategy), it has strong IP's even if they are done to death and it boasts an interesting new touch screen display that has the potential to add a lot to a game. Nintendo will always be around - as console maker - it's 20 million sales above it's competition last gen in home consoles and nothing comes close to the handhelds as the top five best selling ones are all Nintendo. They have the biggest IP's ever - Pokemon, Mario, Smash Bros, Zelda, Star Fox, Sonic (now). I grow tired of the same Mario game every single year (not including galaxy... that game was fucking beautiful) but the unwashed masses do not. Mario is and will most likely always be the biggest selling franchise in the games industry by light years.
Nintendo have a lot they can improve on, and I wish they would, but they don't need to. They are making more than enough money making mistakes they can afford to make.
If I was going to have the perfect Nintendo company - I would re-release the Wii U call it the "Nintendo" - make a bold statement. A fresh start. Limit yourself to 1 or 2 games per IP for that console. Create some new ones, nintendo have some of the most skilled game designers in the world, they should use them. Stop relying on gimmicks like 3D and motion control. People like buttons and immersion. Keep it like that. Improve the social media element into the miiverse. Stop pretending your so different to every other company and let people put Blu Rays and CDs on the console. It has the ability currently and they block it because they don't want to "copy" what other companies do. Last but not least I would hire some fresh faces into the management to give the 2 and a half decade old idea's and CEO's a clean out. Some fresh ideas. But sadly this will most likely never happen. Iwata, Miyamoto and the like are there to stay and so is the direction of a stubborn company. Why? Because they can.

[trashcanman]

I wrote an article on Gamemoir a few weeks ago about the potential gaming industry crash that a lot of business folk see coming due to inflated budgets and overflooded markets and I realized that Nintendo may actually be smarter than the other two. More power means more overhead. Sony in particular has been selling consoles at a loss for two generations now, depending on games sales to make up for it. Except they often haven't had that many games to sell. Sony and Microsoft are killing themselves trying to have the fanciest hardware with the best graphics and the most multimedia functionality while Nintendo keeps it simple. Plus, they've got the DS to fall back on as well as the fact that most of their biggest selling games are self-published so a console failure to them doesn't mean what it does to other companies. If the industry implodes, they may be the company left standing and they'll be poised to dominate the market again just like the last time when Atari slipped.