Wii U Will Support Two Gamepads at Launch, The Games Won't

In what has been a fairly consistent flip-flopping -or better yet massaging- of statements concerning the initial gamepad support on the Wii U, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime  has brought further clarification to the matter. Namely, that while the Wii U will support two gamepads at once, none of the launch titles will.

"Games need to be built that can take advantage of the two GamePad controllers," he told Gamasutra in an interview, "It's going to be well after launch for those game experiences to come to life." He goes on to say that he believes developers are the best people to figure out how to utilize a second screen before moving on to more.

Now we'll ignore, for a moment, the use of the phrase 'figure out' even though that bothers me somewhat. But I'm more interested in how many people does Nintendo think will buy a second $150 controller to get a little more content out of a game that will most probably cost $60 alone? And bringing a game to market that requires a second gamepad essentially raises the cost  to somewhere around $210 or more depending on the sales taxes in your area (which here are close to an anal-clenching 10%).

It's a contorted tale to be sure, but we should be used to that when it comes to the Wii U by now. And as much as I liked the games I played on the system at E3, I can't help but to think that this schizophrenic styly of bringing a product to market is only going to hurt Nintendo in the end.