Data Shows the Nintendo Switch is Way, Way Better than the Wii U

When gaming historians look back on Nintendo consoles, there’s gonna be a big ol’ question mark (or a censoring black bar) over the Wii U. Nintendo was primed to take the gaming world by storm, having already trounced Xbox and PlayStation, leaving them both gasping for air and trying to catch up. If they had carried that momentum, who knows how the gaming world would have changed. But instead, they released the Wii U, a console that tried too hard in the wrong areas, didn’t try hard enough where it counted, and ultimately ‘enjoyed’ one of the shortest generational cycles in gaming history, launching in 2012 and effectively “dying” in 2016.

And if you want to truly understand how badly the Wii U did, then all you have to do is compare it to the Switch. Which is exactly what Kotaku UK did when they reported on the state of the Switch at the end of December last year.

Specifically, they were looking at the number of games available on the Nintendo Switch after 279 days on the market compared to when the Wii U was 279 days old .What they found was that the Switch had an impressive 191 games available on it after nearly 300 days, while the Wii U only had 60. As a matter of fact, the Wii U only reached 191 games after 856 days. So it wasn’t even close.

The data also revealed that games reviewed on the Switch received higher scores overall compared to the Wii U, but really, considering this has been the console Nintendo has gone big with Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, that can hardly be surprising.

I can’t say this data is surprising, but I would certainly call it eye-opening. I’m not sure if it speaks to the Wii U’s failure, or the Switch’s runaway success, but in either case, I’m sure Nintendo is glad those days are behind it.