Nintendo beef-boy Reggie Fils-Aime has said that, very much like $99 tablets available to buy at CVS, the Wii U controller touch screen will not feature multi-touch. There shall be no pinching, swirling, or anything in between, because Nintendo has decided it wouldn’t “feel” right.
“When we went through the building of this and, given some of the functionality, we thought that single-touch was a more appropriate option, especially when you’ve got other button configurations,” he told that wacky Kotaku.
Of course, the fact that it made the whole thing cheaper helped!
“Certainly there’s a cost to it. Again, we envision this as a controller that you’re putting in your hands and you’re doing a two-screen experience. The concept of putting it in your lap to do multi-touch for us just feels unwieldy.”
Sarcasm aside, I do understand the point. When Vita games use multi-touch, it can feel unwieldy enough, so I imagine it’d really get in the way while trying to use the chunky Wii U controller. That said, there’s nothing wrong with options, so I don’t think the system would suffer for the added feature. Aside from the cost element, of course, which I’ll wager was the real driving factor.