This is the third part of the ongoing analysis of consoles this gen. You can get up to date with other parts of the series which can be found in the following links:

Source Data

The data has been collected through days of webscraping to ensure that my endeavour does not result in spamming requests to one of my favorite sites. For the same reason, I will not be sharing the scrapper code.

he analysis below is based on all the games released from 1st November,2013 to 1st June,2017.Although, Wii U launched almost a year earlier, the time frame has been kept as such to have a valid comparison with other consoles. Now off with the analysis.

Classification

The score classification is done as follows:

  • Rated : Titles having minimum number of reviews as per metacritic policy
  • Exceptional: Titles with >=90% Metascore
  • Great: Titles with >=80% Metascore
  • Good: Titles with >=70% Metascore

As you can see, we refrained from categorizing anything lower than 70 because a console is defined by the good games it have. Moreover, due to wide availability of variety of game development tools, a lot of low quality games flooding the market and they can’t really affect the reception of a console.

Critical Acclaim

In our analysis period of 43 months starting from November,2013 to June,2017, Wii-U saw release of 601 titles compared to 1888 titles on PS4 (Check PS4 in Numbers) and 1305 titles in XBox One (Check XBox One in Numbers). But only 234 titles were rated by critics which is a measly 39% of total. It again goes on to show the abundance of low level releases and reluctance by most reviewers to review Wii-U games.

September,2016 saw most number of releases with 34 in total while October,2015 was leader of rated releases with 15 rated titles.

Exceptional Releases were rare sights with 06 titles garnering top plaudits with no multiple exceptional release in a single month.Longest wait between two exceptional releases was 23 months from April,2015 to March,2015 with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild breaking the streak. This goes onto show that the Big N decided to abandon the console early.

Lowering the level to Great Releases or Better, Wii U gave us 53 titles giving at least 1 great release in 31 months out of 43 months.

Going even lower to Good Releases or Better, 121 titles- 51%(lowest in class) of rated releases garnered critic score>=70.

Longest wait between two exceptional releases was 23 months from April,2015 to March,2015 with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild breaking the streak

Zooming in to the releases, we observe that Nintendo’s platform never saw pretty streaks of great releases going for it like its two competitors. To recap, XBox One had at least 5 good titles every month since August,2014 while Sony’s platform got a similar streak going on since March,2014. No surprise that Wii U had to leave the field early.

Nintendo’s platform never saw pretty streaks of great releases going for it like its two competitors

User Appreciation

Moving on to User Scores, Users were less welcoming to Wii-U compared to critics as they rated 224 titles- 37% of total. This again goes on to show Wii U’s failure to reach the customers.

Users were far more welcoming in terms of Exceptional Releases as they rated 08 releases higher than 9 which is surprisingly higher than both XBox One and PlayStation 4.

Users rated 08 releases in Wii-U greater than 9 which is surprisingly better than both XBox One and Playstation 4

Lowering the level to Great Releases or Better, User rated 67 titles as great or better.

If we go even lower to Good Releases or Better, 134 titles- 60% of rated releases garnered user score>=7. Somehow, Users were more appreciative than critics of Nintendo’s platform all across the board.

Users were more appreciative than critics of Nintendo’s platform all across the board.

A zoomed view reveals, User liked the October-2014 with 12 titles getting good or better reviews from users. The shocking observation is that there were months when Wii-U could not manage to release a single good release.XBox One is yet to see one such bad month and PS4 had one on December-2013 when it was just gearing up.

That’s it for now. If you like this post and want to keep up with rest of the series, you can find previous entries here:

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