This week was 40k??? Pretty good considering there are great first party games for it besides Super Mario Wii U

There are 14 more weeks to the end of April.  There is a deficit of 764,256.  That means the Wii U will need to start selling 54590 per week, every week until the end of April.  At its current rate of sales it will be behind by over 200k despite it being 23 vs 6 weeks in Europe.  From PAL charts and Japanese charts, we know this past week was likely down, but let's be generous and say it was flat.  That would bring the average needed for the next 13 weeks to 55,759, if it is down like Japan, that brings it up to 56,288.  As for the software you listed, the first game doesn't come for five weeks, the rest is even later.  That means we can probably expect the Wii U to be flat or down for the next five weeks.  If we are once again generous and say it will be flat from the week ending the 26th, that would put the deficit at 601,696 with 9 weeks left.  That would require 66,855 per week.  The Wii U is likely also overtracked by about 77k based on the numbers from Nintendo, that brings us up to 75,410.  Now does that seem likely when only two of the listed games are new exclusives?  That means even with an extra 17 weeks in Europe there is a good chance the Wii U will be behind the PS3 come April.

So what you're saying is that there's no historical basis for judging how the Wii U will go... and therefore, we must conclude that it's failing at the moment?

It just doesn't make sense. If there's no comparable situation, then there's no reference point to judge how things will progress from here.

 The PS2 was never marketed as a casual device, the Wii was. The Wii U was not marketed as a casual device for that Nintendo will suffer the same fate of the N64 and the Gamecube, in profiting but losing more and more marketshare. Nintendo was forced to pander to the casuals since Sony expanded the market and beat them at their own game with the third parties (except this time the third parties liked Sony's way of doing business). Also Sony (outside of the PS3) kept devs happy with tech specs, which is one of the reasons they left Nintendo in the first place.

As for the holiday rush, sure Sony's launch wasn't great, but their 2007 reveals kept people happy.

The 3ds recovered around christmas in 2011.
The Wii U is selling well for a console thats competing with other consoles that are twice as cheap and have an established library. look at the ps3 and xbox 360 launches and the sales are very similar around launch.
The Wii died because the Wii U came out and no one wants a wii.

The games situation is just like the early 3DS and 360 though; a lack of compelling, system-selling software. Once those systems got their big games, the sales followed. They may be different products and such, but the rule that software sells hardware holds true across all gaming consoles, portable and home.

Good point.  Though I wouldn't call the N64 a failure.  33m isn't a win, but it isn't a failure.  Especially when compared to the 22m vs 150m that happened next lol.

First of all, as I said before, you can't just go "it only had X weeks in Europe, so it's not an equivalent comparison". Not only did the delay allow them to leverage the anticipation driven by information coming from the other regions (where it had been released), but it also allowed them to have a much larger stock at launch in Europe.

Allow me to demonstrate the effect. The Xbox 360 launched in North America, Europe, and Japan around the same time, but other parts of the world, including Australia, got it about 4 months late. The result? From Wikipedia: "the Xbox 360 launch was the most successful in Australia's history at that time, selling over 30,000 consoles in the first four days."

By comparison, it didn't really break any records in America, Europe, or Japan. To put the number into perspective, they had at least 30,000 consoles available to sell within the first four days... in Canada, they had just 32,000 consoles available at launch, despite the country being about 60% more populous than Australia.

Now, with the Wii launch, sales in Australia did break records, but no more so than in other regions.

If you look at PS3, they aimed to have 400,000 units available in the US at launch, and failed to even reach that - estimates put the actual number somewhere around 240,000 units. In Europe, they had 1 million units available at launch. And again, in Australia, the numbers were a lot higher than you'd expect by comparing with America - 27,000 at least.

At the US launch of the PS3, there were 12 games available. At the European launch, 29 games were available. The extra 17 games were there precisely because there was an extra 4 months available for development.

So in both cases, when parts of the world had delayed release, those parts had stronger sales. Basically, what ends up happening is that sales in the delayed regions aren't actually negatively impacted by the delay, after a few weeks. The extra sales during the first week or two basically catch it right back up.

Now, to turn attention back to the numbers you've quoted. There are a few flaws in your thinking. First of all, retailer sales tend to impact system sales, too. Costco has dropped their Wii U prices by $50 for a lot of people - that's going to drive some sales in the US. Other sales will be happening over the next couple of months. It doesn't actually require an official price drop by Nintendo to do this.

Second is that you're trying to describe the bump from games like Rayman Legends on the basis of what sort of bumps you see from games on the 360 and PS3 now. That's not how it works, this early in the system's life. At this point in time, there's effectively three exclusive Wii U titles - NMSB U, Nintendo Land, and ZombiU. These are the only games that can drive sales right now. The number of such games jumps by at least 67% over the next two months. These games will cause a reasonable bump in sales. Monster Hunter Tri is also likely to produce a bump, although not as large. Injustice has the benefit of basically being the first 360/PS3/WiiU game to be released simultaneously on the Wii U. And Dragon Quest X, despite already being available on the Wii, is almost certainly going to sell better on the Wii U. Why do I say this? Because it is easy to compare recent DQ sales. DQ8 sold over 3.5 million copies in Japan. DQ9 sold up over 4 million copies in Japan. DQ10, however, has only sold about 500,000 copies so far on the Wii. When the game was announced, it was announced for release on both Wii and Wii U, the Wii U version was announced to have a number of benefits over the Wii version (orchestrated music, a significant graphical improvement, etc), plus a reduced price for upgrading.

And third is the assumption that Nintendo isn't going to do anything more to encourage purchase of the system in the next three months. You can bet that they've got another line of advertising on the way, for instance.

And finally, you're assuming that current numbers are in any way representative of the ongoing average. There's simply no reason to assume that one week's worth of data is enough of data to conclude how sales will continue.

No, I'm saying that the data you get from such an analysis is inconclusive. But, going by the moment (which is all we have), its not headed for greatness. I imagine people will still be chanting "give it some time to settle" one year from now if sales haven't picked up greatly.

The 360 had quite a few things going for it that the Wii U doesn't; tech, good 3rd party support, lots of leverage with pricing (not only due to the hardware not being terribly expensive but MS can afford losses in the console division like no other since their primary business is still software and extremely profitable at that), incredible strength in the US and UK markets (the 360 sold 1 million in one week in North America alone, a feat not even the Wii pulled off), the Wii U has no such market for now. The 3DS was in a market with no real competition and has also enjoyed a lot better 3rd support than Nintendo's home consoles and it was aimed squarely at the DS crowd while the Wii U is aimed at two groups and missing both, it (3DS) also launched in a time window where Nintendo were able to adjust the price and take a small net loss on the hardware since their home console had forked in massive amounts of cash and secured them record revenue for a few years, the Wii U is coming into life at a time where Nintendo has posted their first ever loss, the Wii died a quick death and stopped moving software abruptly and the 3DS hasn't really made them that much money yet. The 3DS also launched while the DS still had great momentum and not in the twilight of it's existence while the Wii U launched after the Wii had become all but irrelevant.

The Wii U exemplifies the age old Native American saying; If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.

More software will help the Wii U, no doubt, but I can't see it pulling 360 numbers lifetime, let alone Wii numbers. The price simply cannot be cut at this point and with stock being ample and shipments slowing down as sales slow, it turns into a vicious cycle, retailers won't bother having a large section for a console and games that hardly move from the shelves. Nintendo are going to miss their initial forecast by about 40%, perhaps even more, if that isn't a sign of some trouble then I don't know what is.

Both the 360 and PS3 moved slow at first for sure but not this slow, the PS3 was missing its best region and had a poor launch line-up for Americas and Japan, the 360 had a pretty shitty launch line-up as well. The Wii U had a decent launch, certainly better than the PS3 and 360 but has dropped like a stone, such a rapid slowdown is unprecedented in home console history.

When all is said and done, I think Nintendo should be very happy to sell 50-60% of the Wii's lifetime totals with their Wii U's but it could end up lower unless things change dramatically.

To sum up; history cannot tell us that it will fail but it can't be used to prove that it will be a success either. Most logic points more towards a rather grim future though, there are comebacks and then there are comebacks.

But nobody is trying to use the 360 or 3DS to specifically predict what will happen with the Wii U. All they're doing is pointing to those other consoles and saying "see, short-term behaviour doesn't predict long-term behaviour". They prove that you can't look at what the Wii U sold in the week ending the 19th of January 2013 and draw conclusions about how well the system will be selling in March 2013, let alone in 2014.

Rather than so many people predicting Wii U doom, why can't they simply say "the Wii U is going to need something more to return to reasonable sales", and leave it at that? It's a reasonable, measured comment that says that there are weaknesses with the Wii U that need to be addressed. No doom, no gloom, and certainly no gloating or joy over the weak current sales of a console that is "competing" with a person's preferred system.