Now that the Wii U is officially a viable contest, it’s time to tear it apart in stop-motion to see what sort of fun trivia makes it tick.
Vsauce3 continues its proud tradition of stripping gaming devices down to their base components while cleverly revealing important tidbits about them you may not have known, like the fact that the 32GB Wii U can hold every Nintendo 64 games. Or things you knew and forgot, like that whole magnetometer business.
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27 responses to “Watch The Wii U Get Torn Apart In The Name Of Trivia”
‘Now that the Wii U is officially a viable contest’
For this week, yeah.
I’m FAR from sold that shifting a bunch of units straight off the throw-out table off the back of one game suddenly makes the WiiU a relevant force in the new generation.
I went to K-Mart, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi in my lunch break today and JB were the only ones with consoles for sale or any WiiU advertising at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I almost bought one the other day for $178, but I won’t be buying one from JB Hi-Fi for $350+ and those other stores have predominantly sold them cheap because they’re getting out of the WiiU business.
Not to piss on everyone’s parade, but the combination of Nintendo talking up its sales figures (up 400% on one month last year when they were shipping next to none), crazy end of year sales (which are actually a bad sign) and the release of one good game have created an unrealistic impression that the WiiU is back on the charge.
I agree, I feel Dick Smith and Big W are in the process of GTFO Wii U sales, but JB will still carry it through.
Personally I would never shop for games in any of those places. DS and HN in particular. Eugh.
I’ve seen games that would be $3 bargain bin at EB still going for $110 at Dick Smith, they’re a joke of a games retailer.
Not sure if trolling… but I bought all new release PS4 games day 1 from DickSmith (Infamous Second Son, Wolfenstein & Watchdogs), all cheaper than any other store that I found, with most at least $30 less than EB. It is rare that I would find a cheaper price at EB for any game. And don’t get me started on their trade in values. Not wanting to start a war, but this has been my experience over the past several years.
Not trolling at all, just my observation, either the prices are high, or my local are very lazy at re ticketing with price drops. I don’t buy games from retailers anymore anyway, better than retail price digitally on the Xbox one with an easy region dodge.
I was a bit late with a response here :/ But fair enough. Perhaps some stores aren’t updating prices or not honoring the same deals, not the first I’ve heard of it. Yeah, if I didn’t have a preference to owning physical copies I would go digital also. Although some of those prices on online stores can be scary at times too.
Dick Smith has been doing some great deals of recent. Like preorders for the Last of Us Remastered… $49.95
The worst is Big W where they take it out of the plastic, remove the disc, put the case on the shelf to get worn down and handled by children and then have the disc put back in and the case covered with BIG W security stickers that can’t be removed without torn label being left on permanently. Also Big W just have the saddest, unhelpful, most oppressed looking staff I’ve ever encountered.
EB and JB both do that at every store I have ever been to in the last 2-3 years.
Not online, I pre-order everything I want for the following 6 months, get it a few days early everytime and in shrink wrap.
Couldn’t agree more, DS and HN are TERRIBLE retailers.
Pretty funny when you hear Crazy Uncle Gerry whinging about online sales when go into their retail store and it’s a sh*tfight.
They do both bust out the occasional gem of a sale though. Normally when they’ve screwed up an order or something and you find something in the bargain bin that shouldn’t be there. I bought my 3DS from DS in Jan 2013 for $120!
I was one of the lucky few that got a premium for 178 from Kmart. Absolutely love it, Nintendo are doing an awesome job at first party games. Have MK8, SMB and Windwaker HD. I feel I’ll get a lot of play out of this console, but I’ll never buy a third party game. They’ll all be on my Xbox One.
Yep, PS4 and Wii U combo for me. I like having a dedicated Nintendo box that will never have a bad game.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that the WiiU is bad value at $178.
That’s CRAZY cheap for any console!
If I’d bought one (and I wish I had) it would have just been to play single player, first party games though unfortunately.
It’s not worth the investment to get extra controllers ect for just 2-3 great party games when I need controllers for my other new-gen consoles that I’ll be playing for the next 5-6 years.
Honestly I had four controllers for my PS3, and probably used them all once, I’ll only buy two now for Sony/ MS consoles. Wii U though is something other people will come around to play. Sony/ MS are all about online play now.
Same here… I got the deal too and I’m enjoying it in between just two games MK8 and MH3
Then take a look at the actual hardware figures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_consoles#Million-selling_game_consoles
XBone: 5.1 million units (shipped as of April 2014), Wii U: 6.17 million sold (March 2014 – before Mario Kart), PS4: 9 million sold (July 2014).
Based on these, I don’t really understand how people can say that the Wii U is struggling. I understand it released earlier but the Wii U still represents a third of the console market. Consoles as a whole do seem to be struggling though. This being the case I don’t really understand why major game publishers seem to think it’s a good idea to snub Nintendo, especially when it’s a console with such huge possibilities (the attach rate alone for Mario Kart on the Wii U is over 20% which games on the other consoles could only dream of).
Nah mate, it’s struggling badly.
Nintendo (like all console makers) sell HEAPS of machines at launch and over the Christmas period. Don’t forget the WiiU has been on the market for a year longer than the Xbone and had no competition at all during that time. Month on month sales of the WiiU are where it’s fallen in a heap.
Like you said they’ve sold about 6.2m of them so far, but their own sales predictions state that they’ll only sell another 2.8m this year.
Between April and July 2013 the Wii U sold 160,000 consoles globally, or just 13,000 a week. So when they talk up a 400% increase over the month Mario Kart came out while intentionally not stating an actual number, that doesn’t mean it’s selling well or that the console has recovered, it means it has a faint heartbeat after being essentially dead in the water this time last year.
Even if they do hit that their stated sales targets for this year (and it should be noted that they revised down last year’s sales several times and still went nowhere near what they’d hoped to sell), it will mean that at the 3 year mark the WiiU will be 1.5- 2 million units behind the FREAKING DREAMCAST (10.6m) in terms of sales at the 3 year mark when Sega pulled the plug on their whole operation! That’s without factoring in that the Dreamcast was (at the time) much more competitive from a power perspective with the Xbox and PS2.
The system has good games, if you can get one for sub-$200 on a throwout table you’ll get your money’s worth. It’s not going to be a legitimate player against the Xbone and especially not the PS4.
The Wii U hasn’t even been out for 2 years yet (not 3) and that figure for the Dreamcast is for the entire lifetime of that console. 6 milion Wii U’s were sold before Mario Kart was released, also before any of the E3 announcements, also before the release of Smash Bro’s. I can only see their console sales getting steadily more healthy especially with whatever X-mas sales they have up their sleeve. The Wii U is doing fine, as well as any console could expect to do in this market.
If console power is really the argument you want to use here, the Wii U obviously can’t beat the PS4 or XBone, but does that really matter? The Wii U was never claimed to be powerful and yet the quality of graphics on the console is still incredibly high. I can’t wrap my head around an argument about superior power and graphics on consoles that are only equivalent to PC graphics cards that were released 2-3 years ago and will be blown out of the water in the immediate future by Steam Machines anyway.
It matters, because new games are being written for the performance envelope of the PS4 & XBox. Spec-wise, the Wii U is at about the same level as the PS3 & Xbox 360. So new games written by third parties are far less likely to be ported to the Wii U. While the new consoles are well behind bleeding-edge PCs, they’re at a similar level to the sort of mid-level boxes on which most games are played.
The Wii U probably has the best game library out of the three newest consoles, but even with a year’s head start it’s already behind the other two in terms of boxes sold.
I’m figuring it will wind up with a similar place in the market to the N64 or GameCube: Well behind the market leaders, with a decent but not particularly impressive install base, and a small library of excellent games dominated by first-party titles. Whether that’s sufficient to keep Nintendo in the black is yet to be seen.
Absolute best case scenario it goes close to the Gamecube, which still makes it a pretty good console if you’re a Nintendo fan, but an epic fail coming off the back of the Wii from a sales sense.
While the N64 didn’t sell as many units (or have as many games) as the PS1 it had a handful of advantages which meant that the top handful of games were the gold standard in console games at the time.
Mario 64 was head and shoulders above the PS1 platformers.
Goldeneye/ Perfect Dark were the best FPS games on a console by a mile.
Zelda OOT was incomparable.
1080, Starfox 64, Mario Kart…. All those games were better than anything else you could get on a console.
The WiiU will get very good 1st party games, but the closest thing to a classic it’s got so far is the remake of the Wind Waker. Zelda might be, but I think it’s at least 16 months away (probably more) and they won’t have the advantages of best-in-class hardware and a 7 year development cycle that allowed them to make OOT as phenomenal as it was.
You’re right it won’t be quite the same lifetime as the DC at the end of this year, but it will be close enough to draw comparison. The Dreamcast didn’t die overnight in March 2001, its sales were extremely low for months before Sega even announced they would be killing it off. It’s not like they had a sudden 2m+ burst of sales in the last 6 months that pushed it ahead of where the WiiU is.
To quote this article: http://o.canada.com/technology/gaming/segas-failed-dreamcast-actually-outsold-the-wii-u
Clearly different circumstances but definitely comparable. As someone who bought a Dreamcast at launch I can tell you there’s far more similarities than just the raw sales- 3rd party support (even the same 3rd parties) dropping off, certain retailers dropping the system, games being finished and not released, both came in at a similar point in the console cycle, both had comparable opposition.
Can we make a bet that their sales are lower this time next year than they are right now?
They’re selling well right now because retailers are selling them at what I would imagine is a significant loss and (from what I can see) not restocking them.
They’ll bump again when Smash Bros comes out, and if/when the new Zelda comes out at the end of 2015 (history suggests that it probably won’t)…… but there’s a LOT of months in between where there’s little reason what to purchase a WiiU. Yeah there’s games coming out, but how many of them will be system sellers the way the next Mass Effect, Uncharted, Halo, Elder Scrolls ect will be?
If people haven’t bought them right now at the ludicrous prices with a very good Mario Kart game on the market and the new consoles yet to find their feet, I’d very much doubt they’ll be buying a full priced one at Christmas to play Smash Bros.
It’s pretty obvious that power does matter, particularly when you’re trying to recover sales for a machine that has been on the market longer than it’s now dominant competitors. There’s not a lot of point comparing them to PCs (or Steam boxes), lots of people only play games on consoles and while they aren’t completely different markets, they aren’t the same market. Let’s just say that if a shift to PC gaming wasn’t annihilating console sales in the last few years when the best consoles on the market were 7+ years old….. they aren’t going to start in the next few.
Game publishers snub it because people only buy first party games. I doubt I’ll ever buy a third party game on my wii-u.
The Wii U is definitely my favourite console right now. Kind of sad they fucked up the name and the thing is now doomed to mainstream obscurity, but hey, HD Zelda.
I’m really enjoying my Wii U. That said no way in hell do I think it’s worth $450 for the library of games it has. I got mine for $180, max I think it’s worth is about $300.
see i dont get this….. $450? i got my on opening (November 2012) week with a game and the black 32gb console for $360. its really not a bad price especially for opening week. If you pay full price its your own fault haha
Yeah, imo the Wii U was good value even on release. I picked my premium console up at JB for $430 and got Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for free.
I’ve already played enough local multiplayer on Nintendoland, Super Mario 3D World and Tekken to make it a worthwhile purchase!