The Nintendo Wii U will cease production this week

After a few years of struggling commercially and with the Nintendo Switch on the horizon, the Wii U will officially end production this week.

It truly is the end of an era. According to Eurogamer, the Nintendo Wii U will officially end production by the end of this week.

For many years now, the Wii U has been struggling commercially. When you compare it to Nintendo’s past successes, it’s been an absolute failure. It’s very strange, considering that Nintendo has mostly been on point all of these years.

Let’s give you an idea of how much of a failure it actually was.

The Nintendo 64 released back in the ’90s and sold 32 million units. Nintendo followed up the N64 with the Nintendo GameCube, which was a great console with great games. But it didn’t fare well compared to the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, and sold only 21 million units.

The company really kicked things off with the Wii. Selling 101 million units because of its innovation with motion controls, the Wii was a major success. Now, this is where the problem lies.

The Wii U was too similar to the Wii. Don’t get us wrong, it was a great console, but it was more of a glorified Wii console. This is only one of the many problems with the Wii U.

When we speak on the consoles features, the only thing that stands out is the gamepad, basically just a controller with a touchscreen on it. It’s a cool feature, but nothing we hadn’t seen before.

Another glaring issue was the lack of online multiplayer functionalities. There were some games supported online play, but it was very tedious. For example, there’s no voice chat, so you can’t communicate with friends or others online while playing. The buddy system is also extremely annoying.

Finally, the games. There’s some great games that come to mind, such as Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Splatoon. However, there isn’t a big catalog to choose from. This year alone, we’ve only gotten three significant Wii U games and that’s definitely not enough.

Fortunately for us, Nintendo is looking to rebound from this with the Nintendo Switch. They’re shifting their focus back to innovation and most importantly, more games to play.

Next: 3 things we want to see on the Nintendo Switch

For now, it looks like it’s time to bid farewell to the Wii U.