Topic: Does anyone else feel like this is more "Switch U" than Switch 2?

not really. the Wii U was a bit of a confusing mess that wasn't marketed well to the point many people thought it was just an add on for the Wii where as the Switch 2 is exactly what it says it is the next Switch

so i got exactly what i was expecting, a better more powerful console that is the next version of the Switch just like when you see the PS5 you know exactly what it is, the next PlayStation, the next generation

Exactly. If they had called it the Wii 2, then it would have been a lot more clear marketing wise and the console would have sold better.
Because the Wii U was exactly that. A Wii 2 with full backwards compatibility to Wii and the Wii 2 having a new Gamepad with screen accessory.

I must be one of the few that actually like the Wii U. I mean it doesn’t compare to the Switch 2 or even the Switch 1 in terms of graphics and CPU, but when it was released I thought the second screen was a novel idea. Some developers did make good use of it, but as has been said in this forum, the Wii U was poorly marketed and so did not catch on.

I thought the Wii U was a good upgrade from the Wii with its HD graphics, but the second screen novelty was not in the same league as the impact the Wii made with its novelty gyro controls. To my mind, apart from the poor marketing, the one thing that let the Wii U down was its underpowered CPU. Clocked at around 1GHZ and only three cores. It had a slightly more up-to-date GPU than the PS3, but could not compete against the CELL processor.

It's funny to think that the Switch 2 makes use of a second screen via the Nintendo apps, so the second screen idea on the Wii U was not a wrong idea, just poorly marketed.

The Switch 2’s CPU has 8 cores, but I believe two of these are reserved by the OS. So, even now, Nintendo’s console is considered slightly underpowered in the CPU area. If I remember correctly, I seem to think there was talk that Nintendo may release one of those cores. If so, this could certainly help in some games where the CPU is used more heavily for physics simulations. I hope that update comes!
I also remember hearing that Nintendo may release some of the reserved memory, which could also make quite a difference.

I skipped the Switch 1, but glad I now have the Switch 2, which is leagues ahead of the Wii U, PS3, and Switch 1 and certainly does knock above its weight in surprising ways. Just consider Starwars Outlaws making good use of HW ray-tracing. The PS4 cannot handle that.

To be fair, very few games do that and not for anything essential. I think people would be extremely annoyed if a bunch of Switch 2 games started requiring a mobile app. I would argue that the BotW/TotK app stuff would have been better if they could have added it to the main game you could get to through the menu but since it's just an add-on people didn't care much. Fundamentally, screens in two different places are kind of annoying to use for people with only one set of eyeballs.

One assumes that the N64 controller and Wii U gamepad were partially made for Nintendo's second sales line aimed at 3-handed 4-eyed aliens.

@FullbringIchigo but that doesn’t fit with what was actually happening at the time

All the casuals couldn’t get enough of the Wii brand. Drawing tablets, exercise mats, balance boards - anything and everything with the Wii brand was hot.

So what changed?

And when those people brought the new Mario, the new Mario kart, the new smash bros, Mario Maker, zelda and other big games and found out they couldn’t play them on their regular Wii, what happened?

Or do you think Nintendo fans sat out for several years ignoring those big new Wii U games?

@FishyS I mostly agree with what you say. When I mentioned the mobile app as a second screen, I was not implying this was currently being used in an optimum way. Just that Nintendo, in creating the app for Botw etc. have replicated to some degree what the Wii U could do natively. But yes, having to gaze away from the big screen or the NSW2's panel is probably not ideal. On the Wii U, I think only a handful of games made proper use of the second screen and by that I mean not just mirroring the main screen. Batman Arkham Origins was one. The trouble is, for fast paced action games, looking away from the action will likely be fateful, but for more casual games, there may be a case for a second screen. But, Nintendo tried that and failed with the Wii U.

@Bass_X0 What changed was mobile took off. Smartphones were a better fit for casuals because they could do more than just play video games on it, there was an entire entertainment package of movies, music, internet browsing, social media, etc. They didn't need to rely on Nintendo for their gaming fix anymore.

@Bass_X0
Yea, @Bolt_Strike nailed it: the Wii Sports crowd had moved over to phones and tablets and stuff like that. Seems a bit too simple, but that's kind of it.

Maybe Wii U would have roped over some Wii grandmas and grandpas if it had launched with Wii Sports 2 or something like that, but it was trying to be a core gaming console under the super-casual Wii nameplate. Just didn't jive.

I loved the Wii U, personally, but everyone knew that thing was dead in the water even before its first birthday. A pretty spectacular failure, really. If Nintendo didn't have the 3DS at the same time, I don't know what would have happened.

Also the main selling points of the Wii U wasn't actually the tablet. Even to the extent that it was, people who wanted a tablet would just get an iPad or use their phone. No, the main selling points of the Wii U were the jump to HD and remote/symmetrical play. Neither of which captured the attention of that more casual audience. These were core gamer audience features but they tried selling them to the wrong audience

Even in that first reveal trailer, the big hype moment was someone coming in to someone playing New SMB and saying the game is on. So the first person goes "ok" and swaps to playing on the GamePad. Which is cool and is certainly how I used it, how I often used portables before, and how I still use portables. But this isn't a selling point to that Wii expanded audience and New SMB was a bad game to pick here to sell to enthusiasts. And the Wii U era was just filled with these kinds of missteps

The HD jump, the other but, was kinda similar. The casual audience didn't care, the more dedicated audience cared. But by 2012 being HD wasn't particularly interesting, the only reason it mattered at all was that now Nintendo was HD. But in the minds of most Nintendo wasn't moving forward here, they were just bringing their hardware up to the new minimum standard. Nice, sure, but not hype inducing

You could argue the Switch 2 is similarly incremental here and doing little more than bringing Nintendo's hardware up to the new minimum standard. I would agree. But the difference is:
1. They have games, and the right games
2. They're not trying to sell it to a casual market who doesn't care

Switch 2 having a Switch 2 edition of BotW, TotK and soon Prime 4 all early on. That immediately sells what the Switch 2 is to the right audience better than anything did on Wii U in that first year or so. And they're actually marketing these games

@skywake I am someone who does not like playing games on my mobile, I find the screen too small for my liking. I have the Wii (still, but not used) and upgraded to the Wii U because of its second screen, which is large enough to make local portable gaming enjoyable for me. It had a very good use for me in that when my family wanted to watch telly, I could play many games on the Wii U but still be sociable in the same room. This was a big win factor for me. Coupled with the Wii U's extra power and HD graphics, it was an obvious upgrade. I was sad that it failed, but that's how some things go. I still have my Wii U and do occasionally power it up. One thing the Wii U has that the NSW2 does not, is all the little tunes playing on the menus. I kind of miss that, but at the end of the day, what we want to do is quickly navigate to the game of choice and play it!

I often played my wii u games on the gamepad rather than take over the whole TV so I might loosely watch a film and also play the wii u at the same time. It was often useful for content on the TV that I didn't need to 100% concentrate on and to be honest I use the Switch the same way. Yes you could take the Switch on your travels where as the wii u you couldn't but there were some parallels in use for me.

I tried to work out a rough passmark cpu score for the wii u by using the original gamecube vs original xbox cpu comparison and then scaling up the performance for 3 cores and the faster mhz and by some quirk the passmark score worked out at 600 which is the same figure for the original Switch. So the wii u and Switch roughly speaking are in the same ballpark area for CPU performance. The Pentium 3/Celeron chip in the original xbox is about 50% more powerful in performance by Mhz compared to Gamecube. The Pentium 3 does have passmark CPU results. The wii u gpu is 176 Gflops and well documented. The Xbox 360 had a 6 thread 3 core powerpc cpu at 3.2Ghz so providing very good performance for that generation. Well above wii u and Switch performance levels. The PS3 when you take into account the cell processors as well as the powerpc central CPU has more CPU performance than PS4 and Xbox One but of course an incredibly weak GPU in comparison. I guess nothing beats the generational leap from wii to wii u though, 12 gflops GPU to 176 gflops. 15x the performance increase plus the it still had the wii GPU internally which powered the gamepad screen when not emulating the original wii.

Of the top 100 best selling Video Game related items on Amazon, I've listed all the games and consoles, skipping controllers, VR peripherals, Roblox cards, etc. Just purely games and consoles with their associated ranking. This leaves exactly x20 games and consoles, x17 of which are purely games, x2 are NSW2 Console bundles with a game, and x1 is a digital PS5 Console.

The top 4 best selling games (not counting the console game bundles) are all Switch 2 titles (I'm counting Mario Galaxy 1/2 as a NSW2 game since it gets a free NSW2 Edition upgrade to 4k with mouse controls). And really we should count the console game bundles because people are choosing to buy a game with the console rather than the regular $449.99 model. Those are games that are selling. So really, the top 6 best selling games are NSW2, despite its install base being half that of Wii U at the moment. Thats a crucial difference between Switch 2 and Wii U.

Think about that. Outselling PS5 games like Ghosts of Yotei and the almighty PS5 sports titles, Switch games like the evergreen Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Smash, and well, Xbox doesn't have a single game in the top 100 so thats nothing to boast over.

Only x5 PS5 games and a digital PS5 console appear in the top 100. The other x16 are all NSW and NSW2 games, and NSW games are backward compatible so they very well may be getting purchased to play on NSW2. But even if not, x9 NSW2 games are listed (x8 if you want to be pedantic about Mario Galaxy 1/2), and x2 of their consoles are in the top 20 (and are subsequently the #1 and #2 video game consoles)

Why is this the case? Because the hybrid design has mass appeal. Gamers are people too. And people in 2025 are more mobile than ever. There's a reason cell phones killed off landlines. People dont like being chained down. They like to take their tech devices with them. They like them small and portable. That goes for PCs too which have seen the rise of tablets and smaller netbooks. The trend is lighter, smaller, more portable.

Switch is the natural evolution of the stationary video game console. That's why NSW1 took off like it did, and because that trend is not transient, it made perfect sense for them to double down with Switch 2, keeping the grand slam concept but improving it in virtually every way:

Better speakers. Larger, brighter screen. Higher resolution screen with VRR. Magnetically detachable joycon. Glide analog sticks (which I'm guessing will solve joycon drift as I believe the friction rubbing around the ring caused small debris to fall into the housing- glide analogs remove the friction, ergo, no more drift), rear grip buttons not just on the pro controller but the charge grip also, extra USB-C port to charge in tabletop mode, way more power with DLSS and raytracing capabilities to punch above its weight and ensure compatibility with modern games, social features like Gamechat and Gameshare, high speed storage and external storage via microSD Express (which I called way back in early 2024 that they'd be using mSD Express and people replied telling me how that would never happen... just saying), they fixed the laggy eShop, audio jack on the pro controller, better wifi chip with 10x higher download speeds vs NSW1, remappable rear grip buttons on a per game basis and made extremely easy snd fast to perform, improved HD Rumble, improved gyro polling rate and accuracy (less tendency to drift), they made the joycon bigger and more ergonomic to hold with larger SL/SR buttons, they added a fan to the dock, an ethernet port and increased capabilities to 4k 60fps (1080p 120fps handheld). And they've brought an onslaught of games averaging more than one a month for the 6 months post launch, but at least 1 big game per month on average.

Compare that with Wii U, where they essentially just made a home console that was a generation behind in power (unlike a portable theres no excuse for lagging behind like that), slapped a 480p single touch screen requiring a stylus onto massive controller, released New Super Mario Bros and called it a day.

It wasn't just marketing (though that was part of it- casuals weren't interested yet all their ads were happy go lucky American families smiling and laughing, eating cookies and crap). It wasn't just the name. The concept itself was simply unappealing to core gamers. As a gaming console it had little to offer that demographic.

I enjoyed it. Had tons of fun. Bought every big 3rd party launch game and most 1st party titles. But if you compare it to 3DS, it was night and day with how much support it was getting. 9 month droughts were not unheard of. Because not only were they not getting any third party support, they were also having to split their resources between two different devices, and the failing device got the shorter end of that stick

It was slow as heck, clunky... it was so bad they had to patch it to integrate a quick start function that bypassed the main menu. And even then, it still took way too long to launch a game. Just powering on and navigating to settings was a chore. So when people complain about the simple interface of Switch 1/2 I just laugh. Because I remember what a pain in the butt it was when you have an OS that's not lightning fast.

So I dont see any similarities whatsoever.

6. Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 [NSW]
8. Metroid Prime 4 [NSW2]
14. NSW2 Console (Mario Kart Bundle)
19. NSW2 Console (Pokemon Bundle)
28. Final Fantasy VII Remake [NSW2]
29. Donkey Kong Bonanza [NSW2]
34. Minecraft [NSW]
36. Silent Hill f [PS5]
40. Ghosts of Yotei [PS5]
41. NBA 2K26 [PS5]
42. Pokemon Legends Z-A [NSW2]
46. PS5 Digital Console
47. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity [NSW2]
48. Madden 26 [PS5]
49. College Football 26 [PS5]
63. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe [NSW]
68. Super Smash Bros [NSW]
81. Hades II [NSW2]
92. Bluey [NSW]
98. Super Mario Bros Wonder [NSW]

@JaxonH The PS audience leans more towards digital while the Nintendo audience leans more towards physical. As for the consoles, it's a safe assumption that both systems will do very well over the holiday season. PS5 players will be picking the console up in preparation for GTA6 and Switch 2 players will be picking up the console for the already released MK World + DK Bananza.

@JaxonH The fact that a console with such a comparatively tiny install base has such a large presence in Amazon's top sellers has far more to do with game sales overall having nosedived, than it does with an indication of success. Bundling Switch games in with Switch 2 is just ... sad. There's just no other way to describe that. What you call a snappy O.S, I see as anodyne and characterless, a far cry from the inventive and appealing front end of the hardware from Nintendo's past.
What I see from modern Nintendo is a company that used to strike a balance between making money and serving customers, to a company that now makes every decision based on money and nothing else, pushing prices ever higher when it's clearly not necessary, nickel and diming their customers at every turn. A failure to use TMR sticks, when that surely would have fixed drift. Micro sd express, a decision which likely has more to do with striking a behind the scenes deal to prop up a failing format, than it does with serving their customers, when the inclusion of M2 ssd support would have provided faster speeds at lower cost to the end user. A screen that is objectively worse than that of the preceding console. Many people, myself included, wondered what Nintendo would do when they no longer had ports of Wii U games to bolster their software line-up. I naively believed they would have to finally increase their first-party development output, but why would they do that, when they can just port Switch games to Switch 2, add on some low effort additional content, and then sell the games to their fanbase again, for more than the original price? The new Pokémon game has a $70 price, $30 dlc announced before the game has even released, and a requirement for an online subscription to to use the mega evolutions. A physical version of an in-game book that doesn't include the additional pages added for the re-release of an overpriced Wii game. The obvious justification for the book not including the extra pages being that Nintendo feared that some fans might buy the book and not the ports. This would probably be a pretty small portion of the fanbase, but to modern Nintendo, every penny counts, apparently. Amiibo that now costs $40. Egregious attacks against the rights of their own fans, effectively bricking hardware (designed to rely on an internet connection for just about everything) on a whim. Patenting game mechanics that have long existed before they featured in Nintendo titles, in the name of stifling competition and the creativity elsewhere in the industry.
This company is a mere shadow of what it once was, so blinded by greed that they deserve to fail with Switch 2. They deserve it, and I truly believe that is what is best for the industry as a whole, before Nintendo drags the rest of the industry down with them.

@WhiteUmbrella I find myself agreeing with this, and I own every handheld since the original Game Boy from when it originally came out. To me it’s clear as day how much Nintendo has changed and it’s sad. I hope something or someone manages to humble them back on their former path because they’ve strayed so far from their former balanced approach to business and entertainment. They’re now down the path of directly competing with Sony — not yet in game creativity, but definitely in how much of Switch 2 marketing was incremental tech speak, and their egregious pricing. Competing on that front with Sony might not end the way they think it will. And full disclaimer no, I don’t have a PS5 for many of the same reasons I regret the Switch 2. I ain’t shillin’.

Is Reddit down or something?

I find it amusing that people would say the same Nintendo who milked the GB for a decade, arrogantly thought people would pay a premium for the SNES, scuttled the Nintendo PlayStation because they thought Sony wasn't a threat. The same Nintendo who decided unilaterally that power wasn't the play, that different input was the play, and decided to go it alone in the Wii/DS era ignoring the established market. That Nintendo, they've changed, they used to be humble

Seriously, Nintendo has always done their own thing generally with little regard for the competition. They've always been the company of cheap components at high margins while arrogantly declaring "but you'll pay that because nobody is doing what we do". The only time in their history Nintendo has been "humble" was in the late 90s and early 00s. And even more specifically, when they rushed the GBC out the door because they were worried about the Wonderswan

They're the Apple or Pixar of gaming. They declare that they're doing things nobody else is. The only reason they survive is that often they are the only people putting that amount of resources into some of these ideas

Didn’t Nintendo make you buy the same games on the Wii virtual console, the 3DS, the Wii U, and then the Switch before NSO really became a thing?

Is that the Nintendo we’re romanticizing now?

Yeah if I have to hear the “This never would have happened if REGGIE was president!” argument again I’m going to be mildly annoyed.
Nintendo has always been this way, the only reason it appears to be worse is because their ability to bold-facedly fleece their fanbase has gotten easier. Enjoy their art (if you are financially able to) and leave it at that.

its kinda funny to me this thread still exists, but i wanna ask a question: What IS the suddenly turned evil company Nintendo’s next greedy, corrupt, move? (wrong answers only!)
Personally, I think theyll release Kirby’s Dream Buffet 2: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (enchanced visuals and added kirby COLORS!) for $70. And mario’s mustache is coming to Mario Kart World for only $39.99.