Anyone still think Wii U will "win" "next gen"?

With competition from next-gen consoles, the next holiday season may be brutal to the Wii U.

It looks like the Wii U may stagnate at around 4 million consoles sold worldwide, which is:

- Less than half of Sega Saturn
- Less than half of Dreamcast
- Less than a quarter of Gamecube
- Less than 1/6th of Nintendo 64

- Less than 5% of Wii



I'm wondering if the number of PS4 preorders is far from the number of Wii U sales.

Who rushed? Nintendo?
You think Nintendo rushed to equate what?

 

At this point I doubt WiiU will reach the 9 million mark.

 

Of course, I'd imagine more than 10k Wii U was sold at retail level in "other" region in the 3 months. That doesn't make their shipment numbers less memorable though.

These are the kind of numbers for which stories will be told, articles will be written and Hitler videos will be made.

 

So we are looking at the worse sales for any system in what 2 decades?
Nintendo management sucks hard imo...

 

'Strongly' is not really the adverb that comes to mind. I wonder what the copy-writer's reaction to writing these press releases is, after years of Wii and DS super-numbers? Do they feel in any way false trying to use the same sorts of terms for what are clearly terrible sales? An honest press release would not be good PR!

 

Maybe the "release of few" and particularly the "few" in there means that due to only few releases the sales weren't driven by them.

 

That's atrocious and not altogether surprising by now. The system is plain overpriced and lacking in value. Bundling NSMBU would alone possibly have saved them from this.

 

More bad news for WiiU.

 

Most of the tidbits...

 

Alright, got some more tidbits from GAF:SporeCrawler, where they auto-translated another news article: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74676967&postcount=146

Seems like there's more restructuring of the manufacturing side. Likely no immediate impending doom for Nintendo WiiU other than increased costs/expenses for making the bits.

 

At current selling pace they might already have a supply that will last a year or two so plenty of time for them to get manufacturing back on track.

 

At current selling pace, they won't need any more manufactured...

 

Could Renesas be hurting because of lower-than-expected orders for the Wii U?

 

Is that being brutally honest, or just brutal? I dunno. It's scary talk all the same though.

It makes me wonder, with the wuu's current, extremely low world-wide installed base, can even nintendo themselves be profitable, developing and releasing big-budget titles like the new zelda and whatnot? We probably don't know the development cost of these titles (is ninty releasing such figures in their financial statements?) but it's bound to be substantial. Japan is not a cheap country to live and work in to begin with, and you'd think nintendo devs would be fairly well-paid...

 

They absolutely are. Its stated in the first news link that lower orders than expected have made the new fab unprofitable, hence the downsizing and reorganizing. I think they were expecting Wii-like sales numbers, which never happened so far.

 

I guess we can finally put to bed any doubt that it was Renesas manufacturing this.

I may have expected Nintendo to funnel a large amount of money into Renesas to prevent this from happening, but I guess they're not that invested. They really should have thought twice about going for an eDRAM heavy design dependent on an already floundering company, it's little wonder why MS went for eSRAM.

 

It was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but thinking about it, Nintendo have to be in a pretty tough situation with this. How many chips can they realistic order off a fab? The numbers currently would be very few, such that the fab probably won't want such a small run (I'm guessing) and the price will be high, making the box even more expensive for Ninty. Should they bother to make more and try a new push on the Wii U? Or would this event be a factor to consider an 'abandon ship, save our money, reinvest it elsewhere' strategy? There must be some reasoning in the board room to that effect, cut your losses, even if it doesn't happen. It's certainly a strain the platform could do without!