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geminigeek · 5 years

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E3 2019 Rumors!!!

E3 2019 is less than a month away, and I live for some good rumors, so here's a list of all the gaming news and debuts rumored to be coming this E3!

Microsoft Press Conference

- New gameplay trailers for Gears of War 5, The Outer Worlds

- The Outer Worlds release date confirmed for August 2019

- Halo Infinity trailer and gameplay, shown off playing on next-gen Xbox "Scarlet"

- Battletoads debut gameplay trailer, 2020 release year window

- New Splinter Cell game announced

- Short teaser of Fable 4 (with rumored title simply being called "Fable")

- Debut trailer of Ninja Theory's new IP, code name "Bleeding Edge"

- Debut of RARE's new IP

- Debut trailer of Sunset Overdrive 2

- World Premiere of Dino Crisis reboot (utilizing Capcom's RE Engine)

- World Premiere of Rocksteady's new game - potentially DC's Justice League, or Blade Runner movie themed

...

Bethesda

- Doom Eternal gameplay trailer, release date revealed

- Fallout 4 coming to Nintendo Switch

- New Wolfenstein teased, not Youngblood or the third entry in the New trilogy

- Evil Within 3 announced, debut trailer shown (Evil Within 2 DLC grew into becoming a full game, situation similar to Dishonored: Death of the Outsider)

- Dishonored 3 teaser!

...

Square Enix

- Long-awaited official Avengers game re-debut, showing gameplay and story

- Guardians of the Galaxy themed action RPG

- Extended trailer for Final Fantasy VII Remake, winter 2020 release window provided

- Kingdom Hearts 3 "Final Mix" DLC detailed

...

Ubisoft

- Watch Dogs 3 reveal

- Beyond Good and Evil 2 new gameplay trailer

- Mario and Rabbids sequel (new genre, not like its predecessor)

- Assassin's Creed Ragnarok debut trailer (Assassins Creed... with Vikings!)

...

Sony

- Surprise E3 State of Play video showcase

- New Death Stranding teaser trailer

- Last of Us 2 gameplay trailer, release date confirmed

- Bloodborne 2 teaser trailer

- Sly Cooper 5 announced

- Ratchet and Clank (reboot) sequel announced

...

- Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order official gameplay trailer

- Apex Legends updates and future plans teased

- Anthem updates discussed

- Plants VS Zombies Garden Warfare 3

- Dragon Age 4 extended Game Awards trailer

- Dead Space Trilogy Remastered on current gen consoles

- Mass Effect Trilogy remaster released for current gen consoles

...

Nintendo

- Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild follow-up announced, developed my Monolith Soft

- Metroid Prime Trilogy for Nintendo Switch (rumored like every previous game showcase)

- Short Metroid Prime 4 gameplay teaser

- Legend of Zelda Links Awakening Remake extended gameplay trailer

- Final Wii U ports shown for the Switch: Super Mario 3D World, Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Wonderful 101, Legend of Zelda Wind Waker and Twilight Princess

- Bayonetta 3 gameplay, winter 2020 release date

- Pokémon Sword and Shield gameplay trailer, new Pokémon shown, Legendary Pokémon teased through blank silhouettes

- Bravely Default and Bravely Second coming to Switch in double pack, Bravely Third teaser trailer

- Shin Megami Tensei V trailer

- Astral Chain extended gameplay and story trailer

- Animal Crossing Switch gameplay trailer

- Luigi's Mansion 3 gameplay trailer, October 2019 release window

- New Paper Mario game

- Unannounced Retro Studios game surprise debut trailer!?

- Super Smash Bros 2nd DLC character announced, shadow drop, available the Thursday of E3; third DLC character announcement

* some of these rumors seem too good or outrageous to be real, especially with an official Nintendo statement confirmed the games shown at E3 are going to release this year, but hey, dream big darlings!

...

And the rest!

- Bioshock 4 announced

- Dying Light 2 new gameplay and story trailers (Dying Light 2 confirmed by Techland)

- New Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay trailer

- Borderlands 3 gameplay trailer, building hype for game's September release

- Left 4 Dead spiritual successor "Back 4 Blood" debut trailer and gameplay

- Harry Potter RPG game previously leaked gets full reveal

- New dark fantasy RPG announced by From Software, taking inspiration from anime series Escaflowne, some kind of fusion of Bloodborne and Armored Core, apparently with story being written by George R.R. Martin... (yeah... the fuck!?.)

- Capcom announces remasters of Onimusha 2 and 3...

- Capcom announces Onimusha reboot/reimagining

- Capcom shows debut trailer for Resident Evil 8, RE Engine shown-off, combined with power of next gen console

- Resident Evil 3 REmake teaser

....

God have mercy on my fragile gaymer heart if even half of these turn out to be true. Again, believe 'em, or call 'em bullshit, this list is purely rumors and there's no harm in dreaming about what the future may hold... right?

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topicprinter · 7 years

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I've initially published this on Medium, but the only difference to this is a little bit of context to what I'm doing now and two illustrations made for the article by /u/MirunaSfia. It might be a little better formatted, also.One time. It was that moment when I woke up and said: I can’t take it anymore. It was just 6 months into MavenHut, at the end of August 2012, but I felt that all I was doing was for nothing, I wasn’t moving forward at all.Cristi and Elvis, my co-founders, were creating a great product, Solitaire Arena - yes, a multiplayer Solitaire game - that was interesting for our users. We were at about 100,000 installs in July-August 2012. I still said to myself: I can’t do this anymore.I was the one raising money for MavenHut. I was the one meeting investors and talking to them, getting all the criticism from them, trying to convince them that a trio of guys from Romania can build a global business in gaming using a Solitaire game. And investors would say things like “oh, interesting, let’s talk next month, to see if you are still growing”. Or “I would invest $50-100k now, but only if you find someone else to invest the rest”. We were, at that point, looking for about $500,000 in investment, so it wasn’t that easy to come out with “the rest”.Nobody told me that raising money took this long. When you were reading the startup literature you were under the impression that it takes several days, the most, to raise money.Cold TruthWell, that day of August 2012, I was finally accepting the hard truth. It might be even longer than the 6 months I had already under my belt. Even though we had good signs from investors, even if we could take €50,000 as investment from Enterprise Ireland because we won a pitching contest with them. Gaming is a cash hungry business. €50,000 would not be enough to hire 2-3 good people and also promote the games. We would be running out of money almost as soon as that money hit our accounts. And this time we would have to pay the salaries of the people that trusted us enough to come and work with us, not only the food for the 3 co-founders.Add to this the fact that I started 2012 with several tens of thousands of dollars in my accounts and now, when I looked up the balance, all I could see were $300. I had put almost all my money in the company.Moreover, I no longer had any personal revenue to speak of. Previous clients from my old consulting business asked me constantly when I was coming back and "make real money", not “startup money”. I’ve already promised my co-founders that I would only focus on MavenHut, so it was no contest. We all quit on previous opportunities, it wasn’t like I was some kind of hero.That’s when I stumbled. For a second, there, I didn’t believe that I could do it. I didn’t think I could make it for 4 more months until the end of 2012. That’s when we would shut down the business, provided we didn’t raise enough money.That was the only time I ever felt that I would quit MavenHut.How come that I didn’t quit, then?First of all, I wasn’t alone in this. At one point or the other, my co-founders felt that it wouldn’t work, as well. But we found that talking to each other helped. So I had a long talk with Cristi that day.Cristi suggested I should take one of the consulting contracts my previous clients wanted me to take and see if I really wanted to go back there, while also making some personal money. He also kept reminding me that SOSV, the US based investment fund, was really interested in us. And the only reason it was taking so long was that we were trying to close the deal during the holidays. Lawyers and investors need to take vacations as well. So we had a business deal in place, but no contracts to show yet.Actually, this is what pushed me over to almost quitting, if I think about it.The context: we already had the deal in place with SOSv. They would invest 50K now and, based on MavenHut hitting specific KPIs, they would follow with another €500,000 investment. But signing the documents kept getting postponed by different things I perceived to be “small” and "not that important". The last block on the road was that the lawyers (ours or theirs, I don’t remember exactly) just let us know that they would be on vacation for a week. Or something like that.Keep in mind that SOSv was one of the 50-60 potential investors I’ve talked to in the previous 6 months. People that kept telling me things like:“Solitaire is free on all computers, nobody will give you money for it"“what if Zynga decides to do a similar game?"“right now there is another team starting in Dublin and the 6 guys in it were part of big companies like Tilt Poker, Ubisoft, EA” (random names, I can’t remember the exact companies, but they were big)“you only have one developer in 3 co-founders, that’s not good"“gaming is too risky"“I have gaming companies in my portfolio and I don’t want to invest in another ever"“I will put $50k, $100k, only if somebody else puts the difference"“let’s talk in a month when you should have more users"“I don’t invest in companies pre-revenues” (it was a lie)“I am not interested in revenues so early, but you should have another product besides Solitaire"All of these reasons are not something new for anybody that raises money. It’s the same, with a different flavor. And it’s killing you slowly.What did I do?Finally, what happened is that I took a consulting contract. Which should’ve been over and done in 2 weeks. And it took 3 months. By the time I got the money from that contract in my account, we already signed the deal with SOSv and already got the follow-on €500,000 investment, as well, because we moved really fast to the KPIs set up for the €50,000 deal. By the end of 2012, when we would’ve killed the company if we didn’t raise money, we were 8 people at MavenHut and the company was growing fast. And in January 2013, the first month we made any real money, we made enough to pay all the salaries from revenues. By August 2013, one year after the fateful day, MavenHut was generating about 30 times the revenues from January 2013.I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I was alone in MavenHut. If I had no people to confide in that would understand me: my co-founders, Cristi and Elvis. I don’t think I would’ve quit, to be frank, but it was a lot easier to be able to talk to someone about your frustrations.It’s interesting that, 4 years later, I rarely remember those bad, awful moments. If you ask me about the early years of MavenHut, just 4-5 years ago, most of the things I would tell you are good things. Elvis coding like a ninja, Cristi understanding the product, me raising the investment “almost" overnight.But then, I meet with an early stage entrepreneur, like I did recently. And she was beyond frustration with the responses she was getting from investors she was meeting. And I remembered how frustrated I was during 2012 when I was raising money. All of a sudden, the memories came back and it wasn’t “me raising the investment almost overnight”. It was me almost leaving MavenHut.When you read on the internet about startups, you mostly read about the AirBNBs and the Dropboxes that raised money easily. Even though I'm sure it didn’t happen like this for them, as well. But, hey, it’s all fun and games until it isn’t.What should you do if you think about quitting?First and foremost, think about what you’re feeling? Is it just the frustration talking or you really don’t trust your business to make it anymore?If it’s the second case, you should quit. You will be the worst resource for your startup ever if you don’t trust what your company is doing.If it’s just the frustration talking, then you can go to the next step: removing the frustration or learning to live with it.Identify what frustrates youFor me, the frustrating thing was the speed (or lack of) with which things were happening. When I looked at it carefully, I understood I was expecting something else. Years of reading about startups made me believe that things happen a lot faster. It wasn’t true for us, though. And, after talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s not true for everybody but a few, few exceptions.I was also frustrated by not having money anymore. Personal money. Since I spent most of my savings on company related stuff (buying ads, paying for trips to Ireland/Romania and back, really small salaries for us to pay for rent and food), I felt uncomfortable with not having any stream of income.You can be frustrated by lots of things. By not having users. By not having the best product you can build. By not hitting your targets. By having bad KPIs. By your relationship with your founders. With your employees. With your investors. All of these reasons are valid reasons to feel frustrated, but you need to identify them and face them.Face the frustrationWaking up wanting to quit doesn’t just happen overnight. You probably had issues with something for the last months or so. But you just kept saying it’s just a phase, it’s a thing everybody goes through. And you’re right. Everybody goes through this kind of moments, but not everybody does something about it.So, how do you face it? Well, the easiest way is to talk to someone as involved as you are in the company. One of your co-founders would be good. If not, talk to your mentor (you do have a mentor, right?). Your investors, if you have them already, could be good discussion partners. Or maybe you have some company advisers. Tell them what you feel. Ask advice. Most of the times, they have more experience than you and they might know what you are going through or put you in contact with someone that does.You’ll find out that most of the times, just talking about the things that frustrate you will solve the issue. You just need to relieve some pressure. Or you will find the solution on your own, once you speak out loud.Obviously, be careful who you talk to. Not all investors are ok with you saying you want to quit and not all co-founders will keep trusting you. Just don’t be stupid about who you trust. And, if you were, well, it’s just another thing you need to sort. And you just learned you can’t trust that person for advice or help.Solve the frustrationOnce you identified and faced the frustration, you need to solve it.More often than not, you just solve your frustration by understanding that some things take time. And you need to learn to wait it out. Like the holiday of the lawyers I told you about earlier. Not even a month later we already signed the initial investment and we had €50,000 in our accounts.Of course, you can still work during that time. One thing I remember doing then was to jump on the plane and go to Cork, where SOSv offices were, and talk to their CFO. I wanted to be sure that he had all the elements he needed to correctly estimate the potential of our company. I had a three-hours meeting and I learned a lot in that meeting. And Steve, the CFO, confirmed to me that it became a lot easier to understand our business model once he talked to me.On the other hand, if it’s something that is not time-related, you need to solve the issue. But now you know what’s it about. So you can find someone to do it if you are not good at that. You can read about it. You can take courses. Whatever. As long as you know what the issue really is, you can do something about it.In the initial stages of the investment process, I needed to do some sort of revenues/cost estimates. And while I could’ve probably done it, it was easier to talk to someone to help me. And this is how our first CFO got into the picture.What if the KPIs of the company don’t look good?Well, this is not a good reason to quit. You just make the numbers better.If you don’t trust that you can make the KPIs better, then you talk to your co-founders/investors and you quit. Or take a different position in the company.Finally, if you still want to quit, talk to the stakeholders in the company and leave. It might be the best solution for everybody. Just don’t leave tomorrow. Give people time to adjust to your leaving, make the transition and then go. And, probably, in 2-3 years, you will forget the bad things and you will want to start a new company. And the cycle goes like that again.And, to answer my own question in the title: What if I quit then? Well, I would've probably missed a great adventure. I'm just glad I didn't :D

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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RIP Wii U: Nintendo’s glorious, quirky failure

Nintendo has ceased production of Wii U less than five years after its launch. What went wrong, and what will be its legacy?

In late January it was announced that Nintendo had ceased production of the Wii U console. The follow-up machine to the hugely successful Wii had sold fewer than 15m units worldwide since its launch in 2012. PlayStation 4 sold more in a year. Wii sold more than 100m in its lifetime.

What happened? How did Nintendo, one of the oldest and most respected companies in the video game industry, get it so wrong? And did anything good come out of the Wii U era? How will the machine be remembered, if at all?

Certainly, some believe the console was cursed from the start right from the first announcement at the 2011 E3 video game conference in Los Angeles. Before that, Nintendo had made vague references to Project Cafe, a new piece of hardware deep in development at the companys famed R&D labs, but the nature of the device was unclear. The E3 presentation was supposed to be the big reveal.

Then, there it was at the Nintendo press conference, in front of the whole games industry. Wii U. Reggie-Fils-Aim, head of Nintendo America, gave an obtuse introduction and showed the unique GamePad controller, with its built-in display. After this, came a showreel of gaming moments, then nothing. The crowd whooped, but when the lights went down, a few expressed confusion: was the Wii U GamePad an extension to the original Wii? Was it an entirely new console? That evening, in an interview with the Evening Standard, the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated: Because we put so much emphasis on the controller, there appeared to be some misunderstanding.

The PS4 and Xbox One, high-powered machines arrived and changed the gaming landscape. Composite: Xbox One S v PS 4 Pro v PS4 Slim v Project Scorpio

A masterpiece of understatement. In some ways, that misunderstanding never went away. Even when it became clear that Wii U was a whole new console, with a unique motion-sensitive screen pad, consumers were nonplussed. There had been rumours that, with its custom AMD 7 series graphics chipset and IBM multicore central processor, the machine would be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 especially as it was arriving years after those machines debuted. But before the launch, developers were already whispering to news sources that this was not the case driving the second-screen would eat up the graphics processing power and the CPU wasnt that special. It was all academic anyway: barely a year later, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived to completely change the technological landscape.

But Nintendo wasnt competing with PlayStation and Xbox, and never really had. Instead, it needed to convert the tens of millions of Wii owners whod rarely bought consoles before; whod been seduced by the Wii Remote controller and the immediate, social experience it promised. Those people were now quietly migrating to other platforms: smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes … Thats who the Wii U was aimed at.

In the months following E3, it was at least picking up interest from the development community. I had done work on the N64, Gameboy, GameCube and Wii and I still maintain they were my favourite systems to work on, so when the WiiU was announced it had me excited, says Byron Atkinson-Jones of Xiotex Studios I wanted to see how far we could go in game design terms with the two screen setup. Were we going to get new game paradigms like we did with the Wii and its controllers?

However, even before the launch, the games media was complaining about a lack of compelling first-party content. The machine would arrive with only two major Nintendo titles, the mini-game collection Nintendo Land, and New Super Mario Bros U, a decent side-scrolling platformer, but by no means a major Mario title with with little involvement from Miyamoto. There were intriguing moments: Nintendo Land has the clever asymmetrical multiplayer action of Luigis Ghost Mansion and the boisterous arena-battler Animal Crossing: Sweet Day. But there was also nothing as immediately compelling as Wii Sports or Wii Play nothing that completely crystallised the idea of the GamePad.

Veteran developer Rhodri Broadbent once worked for Q-Games in Japan, and met Shigeru Miyamoto while making Star Fox Command. He felt there should still have been a role for the Wii Remote in the new era. The fact that Wii U did not come bundled with a Wii Remote was really disappointing to me, he says. I felt that the identity of the Wii Remote was worth continuing, and that combining the jump to HD visuals with the jump to HD motion control of the Wii Remote Plus would have been a smart play. In terms of marketing, the Wii Remote was iconic from the get-go, whereas the GamePad sadly didnt really get to find its identity in either software, nor marketing. There were some truly excellent, best-in-class games released for Wii U, but very few of them gave life or character to the GamePad.

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The GamePad, as a unique selling point, was also a unique curse, an albatross around the neck of the whole project. Designers struggled over its multifaceted nature: should they support it as a standalone screen, a second-screen for the TV, or as a device to allow asymmetrical multiplayer experiences (the player with the GamePad is able to have a different experiences to others using Wii Remotes). It was a tough business proposition too. Games publishers like to be able to transition their projects freely between different machines most modern game engines are platform agnostic making this process easier. But Wii Us controller demanded a different approach, so including the console on multiplatform projects was complicated and expensive even if they were just going to use the GamePad as a mini-map, which many did.

Of the third-party games available at launch, most were quick conversions of familiar PlayStation and Xbox titles: Call of Duty, Batman, Fifa… few of these exploited the GamePad feature-set in truly innovative ways. The best was perhaps ZombiU, a fascinating survival horror title with a neat permadeath mechanic, set in a post-apocalyptic London that made inspired use of the GamePad as both an environment scanner and a cellphone. With its tense, gory action, it also brilliantly subverted expectations of a Nintendo launch title. But it wasnt enough.

The problem is, mainstream game development is all about confidence. Console manufacturers have to be certain that third-party publishers will support the device; third-party publishers have to be sure that consumers will buy it, and draw confidence from first-party titles; and consumers wont commit until they know there will be great titles from both first- and third-party studios. Its a vicious circle of reliance, and it often all depends on that launch week. Nintendo just didnt come up with the goods to inspire consumers, and because of this, the likes of Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft were all backing off right from the outset.

Meanwhile, Nintendo was trying to make things easier for independent developers, noticing the huge influx of excellent indie titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. After the success of the 3DS eShop in attracting experimental games, the company set out to improve its digital store for the home console experience. However, its legacy was not good. On the Wii, support for smaller studios was patchy: the submissions process was, according to some studios, extremely lengthy, and there were sales thresholds that made it risky to commit to offbeat projects. Even after these problems had been addressed, Wii U had no support for the important multi-platform games engine Unity until much later in the consoles lifespan, strangling its potential with the indie community.

[The Wii U dev kit] was clunky and far more difficult to setup than its predecessors, says Atkinson-Jones. I remember opening the box it came in and there was a warning saying it was very easy to brick the machine so getting it setup was a terrifying prospect. Id love to say I got further than this but the reality is that even though Nintendo had signed So Hungry to appear on WiiU, Unity would not actually be ready for another year its because of this my other game Blast Em! came about and thankfully that game has kept my studio running. Once you got past all the problems of setup and getting a working build of Unity, it was just that much harder than doing any kind of cross platform work – the big difference being the two displays of course.

Nintendos Wii and revolutionary remote. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA

So the Wii U had a lot to contend with: a poorly conceived debut, a unique selling point that was difficult to describe, and a hesitant development community unwilling to commit resources to a quirky machine. But it did provide moments of genuine brilliance. The defining first-party titles Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros, Splatoon and Pikmin 3 may not have been top tier Nintendo originals (theres no Miyamoto Mario, no new Zelda), but they were excellent games, filled with interesting ideas and classic moments of design genius.

Pikmin 3 is one of the greatest games I have ever played on any system, says Broadbent. Its mission mode is so tightly balanced, with so many tricks and techniques to optimise battles, find new routes and shave seconds off your time that I can and often did replay the same mission for entire days without noticing that the my weekend had disappeared. Im a big fan of the oft-overlooked, but to my mind never bettered, New Super Mario Bros U, especially the challenge modes. And keeping with Mario, Super Mario Makers musical, whimsical user interface is a masterclass in hiding complexity and infusing character into menus the way the sound effects harmonise with the background music as you place objects on the screen is endlessly charming to me.

There were beautiful third-party games too, sparsely spread out though the machines lifespan perhaps, but certainly there. Cult Japanese studio PlatinumGames, best known for its demanding brawlers, was an unexpected hero producing two masterpieces for the machine: the extravagant Bayonetta 2, and the kookie super hero puzzler, Wonderful 101. Warner Bros brought us the excellent Armored edition of Batman Arkham City, but also the ludicrously overlooked Lego City Undercover, a hilarious Grand Theft Auto pastiche, which is now rightfully being remade for current consoles.

More importantly however, there were indie developers who truly embraced the idiosyncracies of the system and its development environment. We enjoy letting the quirks of specific hardware inspire new ideas and features here, so from a design point of view, Wii U was a lot of fun, says Broadbent. Gyros, a camera, a touch screen there was a lot there to use. For Scram Kitty, I had the idea of making the titular cat appear as a sort of sports commentator on the TV while the player focused on the GamePad action, and although in the end that element didnt turn out to be an essential feature of the game, it was a great source of personality for the game, and one which kept throwing up new ideas throughout development.

Highlights included DrinkBox Studios crazed platformer Guacamelee!: Super Turbo Championship Edition, the lovely retro platformer Shantae and the Pirates Curse, and the intriguing puzzler Art of Balance. Most were multiplatform, but lots used the Wii U capabilities in interesting ways. A key example was the engrossing Affordable Space Adventures from Danish developer KnapNok Games. In this interstellar puzzle game, the GamePad was used to monitor and interact with your crafts primary systems, including engines, anti-gravity controls and scanner, providing a great Star Trek bridge experience.

There were also thoughtful conversions of iOS titles, including Dakko Dakkos translation of the spooky narrative adventure Year Walk. We took a much more all-in approach to the machines feature set, combining the gyros, touch screen, separate displays, and even subtly altering the audio between the gamepad and the TV, to create very satisfying controls and puzzles, says Broadbent. The end result feels uniquely suited to Wii U.

Its also worth remembering Nintendos unique attempts to create friendly online communities around the Wii U. The Miiverse is a family-friendly social network in which players can chat about what theyre playing, draw and share pictures, and seek gaming advice, all within a safe, charming environment populated with customised Mii characters. It was a much more warm, human approach to networked play than Xbox Live or PlayStation Network and, as Jennifer Schneidereit, co-creator of luscious historical adventure Tengami discovered, it allowed unique relationships between developers and players:

It was possible to post to Tengamis Miiverse from within the game, to show level progress or ask other players for help, she says. As a developer I was able to interact with people in Tengamis Miiverse and help with puzzles, answer their questions and listen to their feedback. Because Miiverse posts are not only textual, players can also hand draw and incorporate stamps, it was a real delight to watch players using our stamps to create artwork of their own.

Wii U had a difficult start, with a difficult idea in a difficult era. The E3 presentation blurred what the machine actually was, and the GamePad was never an easy proposition to market unlike the Wii Remote that people could see was fun, just from the adverts. Meanwhile, with Xbox and PlayStation continuing their graphics arms race, and competition coming in from smartphones and tablets, the gaming audience seemed to be stratifying into two groups: the sorts of players who bought consoles and high-end PCs, and the sorts whod quite as happily play Candy Crush Saga for free on their phones. The idea of a console as the central focus of a party or family event, which had peaked between 2005 and 2010 with both the Wii and the rise of music games like Guitar Hero, had drifted out of favour.

Nintendos Shigeru Miyamoto. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Now here comes the Nintendo Switch, a regeneration of the Wii U concept where the GamePad effectively becomes the console, with its own built-in controllers. If anything, it is a more flagrant attempt to seduce casual players away from their phones, while tapping into the family living-room appeal of the original Wii. Broadbent sees Switch as a reconnection with that machine: Im very happy that the joy-cons have so many little tricks in them, and encouraged to see games like ARMS push forward higher-fidelity motion controls right out the gate. But Im mostly happy that Switchs identity as a home console thats not tied to your TV is being communicated so clearly.

Communication, it seems, is key. The Wii did its own communicating: you just watched people playing Tennis or Bowling and you knew it was fun. Nothing Nintendo has done with its hardware since then has been quite so alluring. But to write off Wii U as a creative failure would be a gross disservice. The GamePad actualised a lot of vague entertainment industry hype about the second screen, and lots of games truly illustrated the magic of the concept. And lets not forget that Wii U also saw Nintendos entry into the toys to life market with its Amiibo characters little figurines that could be placed on the screen to interact with games. They sold over 40m of those.

In years to come, people will pick up the console second-hand, with a few games Super Mario 3D World, Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8 and theyll realise what it was that Nintendo had in mind, theyll understand the appeal of the hardware. Much too late, of course.