The sales figures for the Wii U has always been low, but now they’ve hit an all-new low with just 55,000 units sold in January.
“I think they misfired on the Wii U,” Wedbush Securities managing director Michael Pachter told GamesBeat. “It’s just not that different from the other two [existing] consoles, and the gameplay isn’t as unique as the Wii. They made a mistake, it’s something they probably can’t recover from.”
You may think that “55, 000 units aren’t that bad”, remember that the Xbox 360, which was released 2005, sold 281,000 units. Even so, comparing the sales of the Wii U to the Wii, and they’re down with 38 percent during the first three months.
“The Wii U sales do look pretty bad,” Endpoint Technologies Associated analyst Roger Kay told GamesBeat. “My sense is that Xbox 360 has the momentum at this point. Dedicated hardware platforms are hard to
Quite a few analysts believes that games are the solution.
“Great games, unique to the platform, would be a very good start,” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian told GamesBeat.
“Games, games, and more games,” IDC research manager Lewis Ward told GamesBeat. “The relationship between key releases — primarily first-party titles — and hardware sales is especially clear in Nintendo’s case. The sooner they get titles like Pikmin 3 and Wii Fit U on the console side and Pokémon games and titles like Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS side on store shelves, the better.”
Patcher isn’t convinced it’s going to cut it, though.
“I think they have made a costly mistake [with the Wii U],” said Pacther. “And their handheld business can’t save them in the face of cannibalization from smartphones and tablets.”
What do you, as a customer, think? Will Nintendo ever recover?
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