We need to talk about the Wii U sales, what happened?

[Asriel]

The system is highly priced, poorly advertised, and worst of all, software support has dried up for two months following launch. The Nintendo Direct last week was great, but to have any impact on the declining games, Nintendo should be announcing releases for April, May and June. It's all well and good to say games are coming, but how many people are going to jump in with that vague kind of promise?

Nintendo should have learnt with 3DS that a high price, soft launch will see a huge drop off in sales. More Nintendo games should have been ready to launch this quarter, with third party efforts and exclusives following in late spring/early summer.

Launching the basic bundle was also a waste of time. Trying to lure in a family market from launch at a comparatively high price with no pack-in game was a very, very poor decision, just like launching Nintendogs + Cats with the highly priced 3DS and expecting the wider audience to upgrade their hardware. Nintendo are treating their expanded audience like they treat their dedicated fans: releasing updates to existing franchises early on in the system's life span, expecting that fanbase to jump on board. That just won't work. Titles like Wii Fit, Nintendogs etc, and models like Wii U Basic, should be coming further down the line, once Nintendo have already built an install base among their hobbyist consumers, once Wii U is a more established entity, once the price of the hardware can be brought down. Furthermore, those titles (particularly things like Nintendo Land and Nintendogs) shoudn't command £40 to £50 pricetags--they should be price more competitively, because the market HAS changed and less hobbyist consumers are using to paying little or nothing for games. If Nintendo want to attract some of that audience, they need to wise up on their release timing and hardware bundling, rethink their advertising, and really introduce some much needed flexibility to their software pricing.

In the long-term Wii U should be fine, particularly in the second half of this year. In the worst case scenario, sales will only pick up around autumn with Zelda and (presumably) a big Mario title, and Nintendo may be forced to cut price before then, or even drop the basic bundle and then cut the deluxe price to the basic level.