Top 5 Times When Nintendo Failed Miserably to Meet Fans’ Expectations

Nintendo is known for setting trends. In order to set trends people have to take risks, and Nintendo has taken a number of risks over the years. Some of those paid off grandly while the other risks proved a setback for Nintendo.

From bad console launches, and hardware issues to bad and untimely pricing of its consoles, Nintendo has indeed made a bunch of mistakes over the years, and those mistakes have cost it dearly. So, revisiting these errors, here we list the top 5 of Nintendo’s biggest failures.

Nintendo Switch Joy Con Drift

Every Switch user has experienced Joy-Con drift at least once. How does it feel when you are playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and while you try to hit an enemy just in front of you and Link automatically attacks the air on the right instead?

Yes, the drift causes characters to move on their own, and the camera position changes involuntarily. And at one point, in games that ask for precision, this becomes a nuisance. Nintendo has yet to solve this issue.

The only solution they could come up with was to repair affected Joy-Cons free of cost, but it is not a permanent solution, is it?

Nintendo Wii U’s launch

Nintendo Switch is everything that Wii U wanted to be. It can even be said that Wii U paved the way for Switch’s inception. The second screen concept of that console evolved into a console with hybrid functionality.

But it failed because Nintendo did not know how to market it. Most people never even saw Wii U as a new console. They thought of it as an extension of the Wii. And they decided they did not want this extension and refused to buy it.

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Others thought that only the gamepad is the console. This kind of confused response came from Nintendo’s failure to be able to tell its fans what Wii U was. And it failed, it failed so hard that the then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had to cut his salary by half to pay the salaries of his employees.

Gimmicks in video games

There’s a very thin line between being a trendsetter and being that crazy scientist whose hair looks like he just suffered an electric shock! Nintendo Wii was a console that gave life to a gimmick. The gimmick of motion gaming, and it actually ran with it. It is still one of the most successful consoles ever with over 101 million units sold.

But, some games on Nintendo DS, 3DS, and Wii U are examples of Nintendo’s obsession with not letting people play their games normally.

Games like the Legend of Zelda: Spirit tracks had all touch controls on the DS. Star Fox Zero on Wii U was not even playable without a second screen. Super Mario 3D Land on 3DS used a three-dimensional display for puzzles.

Even though they were excellent games, they gave players more frustration than excitement.

N64 Disc Drive

Nintendo lost a lot when it decided to go with carts for N64 instead of CDs. It decided to fix that by instantly starting production on Disc Drive expansion. This allowed users to save images, create animated videos, and do a number of creative things on their consoles.

It even had an internet port, making it one of the first consoles to have internet connectivity. But, there was a lack of worthwhile software and a very high price tag for what it offered and that’s why it flopped.

Creation of PlayStation

Nintendo is a company that loves its IPs and loves everything else it creates. Its various copyright policies dictate that maybe Nintendo is a tad over-possessive of its properties.

Due to this nature, Nintendo ended up creating one of its biggest competitors in the industry. Once Nintendo and Sony partnered to create a gaming console by the name of Nintendo PlayStation.

This console was supposed to have a disc drive. The CD drive support was its biggest feature. A jump from carts that had around 20 MB space on average to discs with 700MB storage was huge.

It is said that their deal allowed Sony to retain profits from every disc that was sold for that system. At the very last moment Nintendo got cold feet and at a live conference announced a similar device but with Philips.

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Naturally, Sony saw this as an insult, and just to dethrone Nintendo, they released the very first PlayStation on their own. Today, PlayStation is Nintendo’s closest competition. Some say that if it was not for Nintendo’s excellent first-party titles, Sony would have crushed them long ago.