Wii U games and sales have proven to be a disappointment for the third year in a row, and Nintendo is finally admitting it. After three years of optimism about the possibility of Wii U sales picking up, it took the holiday season of 2013 to show Nintendo that their expectations have been too high.
This is sad news because it shows us that the company that revived the video game market after the E.T. video game crash has run out of effective innovations to keep the gaming industry going. Could this be the beginning of the end for Nintendo ?
The road to the Wii U probably began back in the days of the Game Boy, the first commercially successful portable gaming console ever made. Since that time, Nintendo kept updating the console all the way to Game Boy Advance, eventually ditching the original name altogether with the Nintendo DS.
It was after attempting to make portable 3D graphics a reality that sales began to slip, and then Nintendo attempted to combine the standalone and portable markets with the Wii U. Games for the console have failed to make it a viable update, according to sales figures.
Wii U games, no matter how good they were, had never been good enough to bring the console the sales volume that would make it as profitable as Nintendo predicted. As previously reported by The Inquisitr , even the phenomenally fun Super Mario 3D World wasn’t enough to put the Wii U on anyone’s must-own list.
Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata punctuated the defeat by Wii U sales for a room full of stockholders by stating:
“We failed to reach our target for hardware sales during the year-end, when revenues are the highest.”
It wasn’t just the Wii U that failed to sell as expected either. Nintendo’s 3DS has also been the victim of a lack of sales, forcing the company to reduce its expectations to something more statistically reasonable.
The sales of both the Wii U and 3DS are now only expected to perform at a moderate fraction of what had been stated before. Iwata expects the Wii U to sell only 2.8 million units by March 31, a 70 percent reduction of previous predictions. Expectations for the 3DS have also been cut from 18 million to only 13.5 million.
Don’t expect further price cuts, though. Nintendo only profits from every console sold if the gamer purchases a game on the side. Otherwise, they are actually taking a loss.
Nintendo expects losses as Wii U, game sales stagnate http://t.co/C0vhgyw6IL
— Apple Games Today (@applegamestoday) January 19, 2014
Considering how much more accepted the original Wii console was, perhaps it’s time for Nintendo to re-release it with next-gen updates like 1080p graphics and a Blu Ray drive. Consumers have proven that Wii U games haven’t been enough to boost sales, so it may be time to go back to the last console that the public actually wanted.