Then that is even less than I thought. Wow.

Their goal should be to shoot for the moon, not to avoid blowing off their own foot.

Scott Moffitt says there will be more Wii U units available at launch than Wii had

November 12th, 2012 Posted in News, Posted by Austin, Wii U | No Comments »

Nintendo of America Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing (quite the title!) Scott Moffitt talked a LOT about the Wii U recently, and he says that there should be more Wii U consoles on store shelves day one than the Wii had on its respective launch.

“We have said that we’ll have more Wii U units on store shelves in week one than we did for Wii in 2006.” he said, also noting that they’ll have shipments coming into stores “much more frequently” than for Wii.

“Having said that, though,” he continued, “we’re guessing there could be shortages. It won’t be there every day. Shipments coming in each week could sell very quickly.”

Scott also admitted that Nintendo didn’t know the Wii U was going to be so popular, but choosing not to run ads until late in the game due to this “wasn’t really part of the plan”.

“We buy through an up-front process like a lot of big advertisers, so we committed to these media buys long before we knew that we were going to have a sold-out situation to pre-sales. We hoped we would be sold out, that pre-sales would be brisk. But we didn’t have the luxury of waiting to see that to know what our major plans would be.”

Via NintendoEverything!

Yeah, if you were expecting 5.5m units available on day 1, that's completely unrealistic.

To put things in perspective, the biggest launch day in history so far was the Playstation 2, which managed a 500,000 unit sell-out day one (NA only).  Including the launch day units for the rest of the world, it wouldn't be remotely close to 5m+ available.

It all depends on PS720, doesn't it? Guess we have to wait and see of that goes...

I can see this happening due to NSMBU and Nintendo Land, Nintendo has one advantage with the U that they didn't with the Wii and that is they know what are their best sellers for home platforms while the Wii had to rely on Zelda TP (which is a great title btw not knocking it but it's still a GC port) for it's initial push. Games like MK and Smash which are other forces in sales are going to be released more strategically on the U then on the Wii and I have a feeling the are going to be more tricks like the Bayonetta 2 on the way.

I think they'll pretty much be fine through out the next gen tbh as I don't think the'll be much difference between all the next gens as power goes to make things drastic like some think.

You're forgetting the 10,000,000 ton gorilla...

None shall ever make a game with the selling capacity of Elebits ever again.

None sir!

Only if Nintendo stops supporting it like they did with the last few years of the Wii.  Sure Nintendo could pull another GCN but I highly doubt it.  The reason why the GCN didn't sell that much was probably because it didn't differentiate itself from the competition enough.  The Wii was weak but different and people bought it in droves.