Wii Outselling Wii U, Only 160,000 Units Shipped Last Quarter

rescendent writes with news that the Wii U still isn't selling very well. From the article: "Nintendo's Wii U console sold only 160,000 units worldwide during the past three months, with the company blaming a lack of first-party releases for the poor performance. Software sales for the system were just 1.3 million units. During the period Nintendo sold 90,000 Wii U consoles in Japan, 60,000 in the US and only 10,000 in Europe and Australia." El Reg reports that the Wii sold 210,000 units in the same quarter. On the bright side, Nintendo is once again profitable.

Comments

Wii Eww

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Nintendo is dead, they just don't know it yet.

160,000 units sold in a quarter usually represents an EOL console, actually Xbox360 and PS3 are selling more in spite of them being EOL. PS4 and Xbox One individual pre-sales have already surpassed Wii U total sales.

This is not a company on a comeback, this is a company in its death throes.

Nintendo made the mistake of putting ZERO R&D into the Wii U, instead just beefing up the Wii and adding a stripped down DS touchpad gimmick. If sales for Wii U consoles are this low NOW, 3rd parties are NOT going to support the platform. Heck it would even be a loss for Nintendo to invest in their own first party franchises at this point as even if every Wii U owner bought a first party title, they could still not recover development costs of the game. It would take NIntendo 5+ years to re-architect a new system that would match or rival those from Sony or Microsoft, they simply do not have it in them to do so though.

Also if Nintendo is going to do things like clone Mario Bros and call it Luigi Bros ( I mean this is so clearly a cloned title), then their consumers are going to get tired of this kind of lazy cheap ass game development quickly.

Nintendo is the next Sega. They will have to bow out of hardware because nobody wants to buy their hardware anymore, but they still have huge popularity in their software franchise. If their Japanese pride and arrogance doesn't get the best of them, then spinning off Mario and Zelda and Metroid as tablet games will be their only savior. Heck even releasing an official SNES or GameBoy emulator for the tablet might drive them to more profit then the fledgling Wii U and requires minimum investment in money and effort.

And don't be an asshat and claim they will come back from this. Unless you are 8 nobody cares about Nintendo anymore. Everyone over the age of 8 was burned by the Wii and its one trick pony, they will refuse to invest in Nintendo hardware again.