Aielyn said:
Obviously, it's specific to the Wii U. Which means the question is, what is it about the Wii U that is weakening sales in the UK, assuming that the claim made in the article about availability is accurate? My guess is price. The Wii U premium pack costs £299, which is the equivalent of US$480. For comparison, the 12GB PS3 costs £150, the 250GB 360 costs £170, and you can get a new Wii with Mario & Sonic at the London Olympics for £90 on Amazon UK. Some of the price increase can be blamed on various taxes (UK VAT is 20%, included in price, so pre-tax, Wii U premium price is equivalent to US$400), but it's still getting the Video Game tax that applies in Britain (and Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, and most of South and Central America, etc). Of course, it's also wrong to assume that it's selling poorly in spite of high stock - that is, that it really was in plentiful supply, as the article claims. We have no idea what their basis for making that claim is - it could easily, for instance, have been based on walking into one store, seeing five Wii U boxes (no confirmation that there were Wii Us in them), and concluding that there must be a massive oversupply throughout the UK. For that matter, it's possible that they asked multiple retailers whether they had Wii Us in stock, but never asked how many of them were preorders that hadn't yet been claimed. We also don't know when in the week they were asking. Without a more solid basis, we must look at the attitude of the article... which seemed happy to emphasise Wii U performance, but ignores the fourth-best-selling game on the chart entirely. So I take that part with a grain of salt, for the time being. Here's a bit of fun. This is a site that appears to check availability of stock of various things online (including online recording of in-store availability) in the UK. http://www.stockinformer.co.uk/checker-nintendo-wii-u Many stores do have Wii U in stock, in both basic and premium... but there's something interesting. The Premium version bundled with ZombiU (which seems to be a very popular game in the UK, having an attach rate of over 38% in the first week) is sold out everywhere except ebay. A really nice feature of the site is that it also tracks availability over time. So I checked the regular Premium Pack stock at GAME according to it... and it repeatedly goes in and out of stock, suggesting that there are limits to availability, there. Same is true of Zavvi. Another look at GAME more directly shows that their NSMB U bundles (Basic and Premium), their Skylanders bundles (B&P), and their ZombiU Premium bundle with Pro controller are out of stock. I don't know what's going on with it all, but I tend not to just accept the words of gaming journalists at face value, nowadays. The most likely scenario, though, in my opinion, is that, without the massive rush to buy Wii U units as soon as they're available, people are more relaxed about being able to buy one when they're ready, and so sales are likely to be delayed to closer to Christmas, when people are doing christmas shopping, etc. |
But let's compare the stock scenario to that of the Nexus 4. The Wii U is reguarly in stock. The Nexus 4 sells out within minutes. It's obvious that joe-average isn't bothered about the Wii U and that your average gamer has either a 360 or PS3 to play on. Considering the Wii U isn't offering many exclusives that appeal to core gamers, well, why would they buy the Wii U?
