What's the deal with the Wii U in Europe?

[Player2]

Kasz216 said:

Chrizum said:

archbrix said:

retroking1981 said:
Nintendo have never been big in Europe:
MS > NES

Holy sh!t, is that true!?

If the Master System really outsold the NES, then yeah, Europe hates Nintendo confirmed.

Master System definitely didn't outsell the NES in Europe, Master System sold ~6.8 million and NES sold ~8.5 million in Europe.

That's still a lot closer then it should of been.  Though really, back then they had the same issue they apparently do with Poland. (Though not displaying Wii U's because it's a waste of display space seems like a pretty damn bogus claim when there was a whole lot of unused display space right below the Wii and Nintendo stuff....just put a shelf there.... or set the Wii U's on the ground.  Common sense really, think that guy stock guy was making stuff up.)

Nintendo didn't really focus on distribution or anything in europe... letting third parties do it all.  While sega had specific distribution channels and such.  Making sega much more attractive.

Even then Nintendo sales weren't that bad. In the 16 bit gen the Genesis sold 15M and SNES 8.6M in the "rest of the world". The actual difference in Europe should be less as the Genesis sold more in South America as well.

What killed Nintendo here was the PSX, Europe became a big market in the 5th gen and PSX sold 40M there while N64 did less than 7. N64 games had outrageous prices (some of them were well over 100$) for several reasons. People could buy 2x PSX games for the price of a single N64 game or 3-4 games from the platinum series... and that is if they bought them. PSX piracy was very popular.

Since then gaming console = Playstation in Europe until recently.

And this explains the strength of the Playstation brand here as well.