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The Rise and Fall Of The Wii


The revolution that was the Wii console with its motion controls and financial clout is now but a distant memory. I remember people waiting in line for days to get a Wii when it debuted, the sales were gigantic and nearly everyone had a Wii. Your parents, your grandparents, and even your next door neighbor. It put Nintendo back on the map and they even toppled the competition in PlayStation and X-Box.

Their competitors even tried to get in on their gold mine by creating their own motion control add ons. And then seemingly just as fast as the Wii rose to the top of the mountain it tumbled down and is now buried amongst the rubble. Why did this happen? How did a console that sold millions of units and was the apple in other console's eye fall so far off the map?

A big part of this is that it was a gimmick. Much like Nintendo's massive failure in the Power Glove(It's so bad...) it relied almost solely upon the gimmick of the motion controls for sales. And just like the Power Glove, the games that had controls that worked with the console were not that great. A lot of the games on the Wii were shovel ware. And big name developers had a hard time putting out content for the console because its hardware and capabilities were so limited. This in turn lead to there being a dearth of games really worth playing again and again for the console and audiences getting tired of the Wii and the luster of the motion controls fading away.

The shovel ware was in many ways arguably the nail in the console's coffin. So many horrible companies could just crap out game after game for the Wii and flood the market with their sub standard product, which sent the console's reputation even further into the toilet. The gimmick getting old didn't help either. But the biggest damage was arguably done by the massive amount of crappy games for the Wii that turned so many off the console.

For years people who purchased the console, only kept it to play older NES or SNES games on the virtual console. And with the end of that by the rise of Nintendo's latest pay to play subscription service on the way and the Switch, the plug has finally been pulled on the Wii and it has had its last final breath. And the motion controls which were considered to be the next big thing? As soon as the competitors threw their own hats into the ring with the Playstation Move and the X-Box Kinect and failed to reach the same heights the Wii did in spectacular fashion, the writing was on the wall. Their failures left an even bigger stink on the major draw for the console and the Wii would never recover from that and neither would motion controls as a whole.

Despite a handful of good and solid games as well as revolutionary aspects of its controls, the legacy of the Wii will sadly be not about the massive success but its ultimate failure to have a lasting and positive impact on gaming culture.



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