"On Friday, the company slashed its annual Wii U sales forecast from 9 million to 2.8 million units "

wich forecast is this, exactly? because wii u already got those 2.8M in the fiscal year.

I get it fine. I also get that 2013 is very different from 2006. Things have changed, that's something Nintendo fans have trained themselves to be in denial about, a lot of them are more out of touch than Nintendo themselves. 

Smartphones have had a monstrous impact on the concept of easy-to-play/NES style gaming ... people now get their fix of that with Candy Crush and Angry Birds for $1 a go on a device that suits their day to day life 1000x better than a Wii or DS ever could be, but I think Nintendo fans have conditioned themselves to put their head in the sand about this and pretend it's not happening. 

Explain to me where the value proposition is for the average person who now plays Candy Crush on their phone for maybe 15 minutes a day to pay $200-$300 for a console, even one with a dildo shaped controller with only one button on it for complete gaming idiots ... where's the value proposition there at all? Especially when the games will be $50-$60 a pop on top of that. There is not value proposition for a lot people there anymore. 

It's time to wake up to reality. That blue ocean is not blue anymore, if it was Nintendo would be raking in mountains of money right now instead of incurring monster losses. 

Just dance has been on a decline year after year. if anything that game just backs soundwave's point. Wii U has games that were popular on Wii but people still arent biting.

To everyone thinking that Nintendo is going to start publishing full-fledged games on smartphones. Here is what reggie said merely a month or 2 ago:

“It’s a topic that comes up all the time. It’s a debate that’s constantly had,” said Nintendo of America president/chief operating officer Reginald "Reggie" Fils-Aime during a wide-ranging interview with KING 5 News. “We recognize that there are a lot of smartphones and tablets out there, and so what we’re doing is we’re being very smart in how we use these devices as marketing tools for our content.”

“We’re also doing a lot of experimentation of what I would call the little experiences you can have on your smartphone and tablet that will drive you back to your Nintendo hardware,” Fils-Aime said. “It’s largely going to be much more marketing activity-oriented, but we’ve done little things where there’s some element of gameplay – a movement, a shaking, something like that.”

“We believe our games are best played and best enjoyed on our devices,” he said, “and so the full game play will only be on Nintendo devices.”

Iwata pretty much confirmed that they're going to try to market their hardware/products through smartphones.

i want them to make stuff for mobile just for the meltdowns, some of yall need to pull it togther. Damn near EVERY other game publisher or maker has SOME kind of mobile presence. I dont get what the big deal is, its not like it will grossly affect whatever endevors they have. But some rather Ninty just disappear, its sad.

thats perfectly fine, i think. As long as they do something, hell they dont even need to do full fledge games.

I don't understand why they're so against the idea of putting the Virtual Console on smartphones. Release a bunch of NES and  SNES games for 5 bucks a pop and they'd make a killing. Or create a subscription service where you can play every VC game but charge a monthly fee for it. Plus it gets a bunch of kids only interested in smart phones tablets to try out NIntendo games.  Seems like easy money to me. 

But wii u won't be able to handle Halo5?

Nope they obviously haven't got 2.8 mil already.

At the beginning of the fiscal year they were at 3.45 mil. In the first half of the fiscal year they shipped 460k Wii Us, so they have 2.34m more to ship from Oct-Mar, we have no numbers for where they're at right now after christmas but it's clearly still under 2.8 mil.

It's Nintendo's own forecast and no they haven't achieved that.

Q1 - 0.16m
Q2 - 0.30m
Q3 - to be announced Jan 29

So they got 460k, which means 2.34m left for Q3 and Q4 to reach the target.