History of video games/Platforms/Wii U

A Wii U console with Gamepad.

History[edit | edit source]

Development[edit | edit source]

The Wii U was proceeded by the very successful Nintendo Wii.

One gamepad prototype was essentially a screen with two wiimotes attached to it.^[1]

Concerns were raised over potential forced child labor in the production of Wii U systems in 2012.^[2]

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata sketched the idea for Amiibo while riding a bullet train (Shinkansen) to Tokyo in the later part of 2013.^[3]^[4]

Launch[edit | edit source]

I actually am baffled by it, I don’t think it’s going to be a big success.
—Nolan K. Bushnell, New York Times article, 2012^[5]

Pricing[edit | edit source]

The typical MSRP of games raised to $59.99, up from $49.99 for Wii games.^[6]

At launch in 2012 the 8GB Basic Wii U cost $299.99 and the 32GB Deluxe Wii U cost $349.99.^[6]

Stagnation[edit | edit source]

By January 2013 the Wii U had notably poor market performance in the United States, having only sold between 50,000 and 59,000 consoles.^[7]^[8] Nintendo reported much lower sales of the Wii U then expected in 2014, leading to financial worries.^[9]

In 2015, Nintendo Amiibo sales were very high.^[10]

In 2015, Nintendo withdrew from the Brazilian market.^[11]

Legacy[edit | edit source]

Production of the Wii U ended in January of 2017.^[12]^[13] 13.56 million Wii U consoles and 103.21 million Wii U games were sold over the course of the system.^[14]

The Wii U was succeeded by the Nintendo Switch, and eventually many Wii U exclusives were ported to that console.

In 2020 some sought out older Wii U consoles due to shortages of the Nintendo Switch during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[15]

Technology[edit | edit source]

Compute[edit | edit source]

The Wii U is powered by a three core 32-bit IBM Power-PC 750 CPU clocked at 1.243125 gigahertz and produced on a 45 nanometer SOI process.^[16]^[17]^[18] This is complemented by an AMD Radeon GPU clocked at 549.999755 megahertz, which is similar to the AMD RV770 GPU series (HD 4000) and built on a 40 nanometer process supporting up to 1080p output.^[16]^[17]^[18]^[19] The GPU has 320 stream processors, 16 texture mapping units, and eight render output units.^[19] Both processors have access to 4 gigabytes of shared DDR3-1600 RAM with up to 12.8 gigabytes a second of bandwidth.^[18] Though the hardware was underpowered for its time, careful consideration to memory hierarchy and interrelation between components eased many performance bottlenecks.^[20]

The basic Wii U has eight gigabytes of solid state storage, and the premium Wii U has 32 gigabytes of solid state storage.^[16]

Just as the Wii was often said to be twice as powerful as the GameCube, the Wii U is said to be roughly thrice as powerful as the Wii. Some also compare the power of the Wii U to that of the Xbox 360. While not necessarily true, these can be useful generalizations.

Console Hardware[edit | edit source]

As the wireless gamepad is a critical part of the Wii U, the system sports a relatively feature rich radio suite. The Wii U supports 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi b/g/n.^[16]^[18]^[21] The Wii U has an additional Wi-Fi N controller to Miracast to the GamePad.^[18]

The Wii U has an optical disk reader which uses 25 gigabyte capacity disks with rounded edges and has read speeds of up to 22 megabytes a second.^[18]^[22] These are essentially non-standard Blu-Ray disks, and as with previous disc based Nintendo consoles, the drive is incapable of reading standard Blu Ray and DVD media to avoid patent issues.^[23]

The Wii U has four USB ports, one of which can be used with an external storage drive or thumb drive for extra space.^[16]^[24] The Wii U can use SDHC cards up to 32 gigabytes of cpacity.^[16]

GamePad[edit | edit source]

The GamePad has a 6.2" LCD with a resolution of 854 by 480 pixels and a resistive touch screen that does not support multi-touch.^[25]^[26]

The GamePad has an NFC radio built in to use Amiibo.^[24]

The GamePad has an IR remote to control television sets.^[24]

The Wii U could technically support two gamepads, though this was not pursued in practice.^[27]^[28]^[29]

Other accessories[edit | edit source]

The Wii U can use a USB keyboard, though this feature was not available at launch.^[30]^[31]

Software[edit | edit source]

The Wii U runs its own specialized operating system.^[32]

Third Party Support[edit | edit source]

Some third party developers, such as Team Ninja, noted the relative ease of development for the system, comparing it to consoles from the previous generation, such as the Xbox 360.^[33] Other third party developers, such as Bethesda, noted that Nintendo did not approach them early enough for them to offer viable support for the Wii U.^[34]