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Vinniegambini on 15 January 2013
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Mummelmann said:
skyehoppers said:

Yes, but it's been one month and one week since the Japan launch. That's a ridiculously small sample size. Way to small to take anything meaningful from, especially when half of that time was the middle of the holiday season. Of course sales are going to drop dramatically after Christmas. Not one sane person didn't expect them too. In your original post, you questioned whether this may be a knee-jerk reaction to WiiU sales, implying that they've been disastrous. You just admitted that they haven't. The amount of pretty unbased disregard of the WiiU's sales borders on sensationalism.

 

Edit: Since it doesn't seem to be working, how do you reply directly to someone else's comment?

I think the worry lies in two main problems right now;

1: Nintendo are set up to fail their fiscal projection by a fairly large amount, likely somewhere between 22-30% at this rate, this indicates that they have misread the market. Their projection was already fairly conservative to begin with, as have all their projections since late 2010 been (they mostly turned out right though).

2: Selling hardware at a loss. Nintendo categorically refuse to state exactly how much they're losing on every piece of hardware, they gave a reasoning along the line of "hardware loss is offset by selling two pieces of software". This loss means that they have little to no wiggle room for reducing the price to drive sales towards meeting the projections and past. The fact that they release a product with a significant loss, which is not something Nintendo does historically, all the problems with the OS and updates, lack of features from launch and somewhat inflexible solutions to things such as battery life on the gamepad, storage capacity and the reportedly horrid loading times for almost everything you do in the OS and with features show a distressed Nintendo that people don't recognize.

All this does point towards a Nintendo that is stressed, having been forced to launch first despite all the bravado from 2008 and 2009, they are facing the mobile/tablet market against their handhelds globally, they have launched  a console with unusual problems that is being sold at a significant loss and their release slate is uncertain at best and meager at worst.

There are those who predicted that this exact thing would happen due to the Wii U aiming for two markets at once and the rise of the tablet and social game. Seeing it progress like this makes it likely that those were right, in the big picture Nintendo is in a very dire position unless trends change fairly soon (which I could elaborate at a later time if you'd like). Are the Wii U sales disastrous? No, no they're not. Could they be a prelude to a disaster? Yes, yes they can and its fairly plain to see. Nintendo are losing money (and have been for some time) basically for the first time since they started up decades ago.

They never said that. Nintendo is a very conservative business. I believe Reggie was right when he said that all it takes is one game for their equation to be profitable. However, he mistakingly did not take into consideration the investments Nintendo made in R & D and marketing. When one takes that into account, it could point towards 2 games. 

On a side note, the Gamecube when launched was sold at a loss of 9$ per unit. This is not the first time.