| Aielyn said:
First of all, as I said before, you can't just go "it only had X weeks in Europe, so it's not an equivalent comparison". Not only did the delay allow them to leverage the anticipation driven by information coming from the other regions (where it had been released), but it also allowed them to have a much larger stock at launch in Europe. Allow me to demonstrate the effect. The Xbox 360 launched in North America, Europe, and Japan around the same time, but other parts of the world, including Australia, got it about 4 months late. The result? From Wikipedia: "the Xbox 360 launch was the most successful in Australia's history at that time, selling over 30,000 consoles in the first four days." By comparison, it didn't really break any records in America, Europe, or Japan. To put the number into perspective, they had at least 30,000 consoles available to sell within the first four days... in Canada, they had just 32,000 consoles available at launch, despite the country being about 60% more populous than Australia. Now, with the Wii launch, sales in Australia did break records, but no more so than in other regions. If you look at PS3, they aimed to have 400,000 units available in the US at launch, and failed to even reach that - estimates put the actual number somewhere around 240,000 units. In Europe, they had 1 million units available at launch. And again, in Australia, the numbers were a lot higher than you'd expect by comparing with America - 27,000 at least. At the US launch of the PS3, there were 12 games available. At the European launch, 29 games were available. The extra 17 games were there precisely because there was an extra 4 months available for development. So in both cases, when parts of the world had delayed release, those parts had stronger sales. Basically, what ends up happening is that sales in the delayed regions aren't actually negatively impacted by the delay, after a few weeks. The extra sales during the first week or two basically catch it right back up. Now, to turn attention back to the numbers you've quoted. There are a few flaws in your thinking. First of all, retailer sales tend to impact system sales, too. Costco has dropped their Wii U prices by $50 for a lot of people - that's going to drive some sales in the US. Other sales will be happening over the next couple of months. It doesn't actually require an official price drop by Nintendo to do this. Second is that you're trying to describe the bump from games like Rayman Legends on the basis of what sort of bumps you see from games on the 360 and PS3 now. That's not how it works, this early in the system's life. At this point in time, there's effectively three exclusive Wii U titles - NMSB U, Nintendo Land, and ZombiU. These are the only games that can drive sales right now. The number of such games jumps by at least 67% over the next two months. These games will cause a reasonable bump in sales. Monster Hunter Tri is also likely to produce a bump, although not as large. Injustice has the benefit of basically being the first 360/PS3/WiiU game to be released simultaneously on the Wii U. And Dragon Quest X, despite already being available on the Wii, is almost certainly going to sell better on the Wii U. Why do I say this? Because it is easy to compare recent DQ sales. DQ8 sold over 3.5 million copies in Japan. DQ9 sold up over 4 million copies in Japan. DQ10, however, has only sold about 500,000 copies so far on the Wii. When the game was announced, it was announced for release on both Wii and Wii U, the Wii U version was announced to have a number of benefits over the Wii version (orchestrated music, a significant graphical improvement, etc), plus a reduced price for upgrading. And third is the assumption that Nintendo isn't going to do anything more to encourage purchase of the system in the next three months. You can bet that they've got another line of advertising on the way, for instance. And finally, you're assuming that current numbers are in any way representative of the ongoing average. There's simply no reason to assume that one week's worth of data is enough of data to conclude how sales will continue. |
Regarding the first half of your post, I don't see how any of that is relevant to the situation. That argument might have held some water 2 months ago after the mediocre European launch, but not anymore. We know that there were no supply issues. If anything the Wii U was overshipped, not the case for the consoles you compared it to. Delaying the Wii U until March would likely only have had a negative impact on sales. The game issue might hold some water, but if you seriously think a few extra games at launch would cause the Wii U to sell more in 6 weeks with a March launch than 23 weeks with a November launch then I've got a bridge to sell you. Retailer discounts could have an effect, but I'm not sure clearances to get rid of excess stock is the healthiest thing for the Wii U.
You do understand that DQX is an mmo right? It's not going to have the same appeal as a normal DQ. Were you confident that the 360 version of FFXI was going to sell huge numbers? I mean after all FFX sold almost 3 million across its various releases and FFXI only sold 150k before expansions. Also DQX was announced way before the Wii U was even known about, it just didn't get shown until later when they also announced it was coming to the Wii U. I really have no clue why you think people would ignore DQX on Wii just so they can wait 8 months and buy a new system to play it. Why didn't this happen for the other games on the Wii U or really any system? Why didn't the Wii owners skip Just Dance so they could buy the Wii U version? Remember how you thought Just Dance 4 was going to easily do 100k in the UK, and it barely did a tenth of that?
As for the rest, I don't know why you think injustice will make much of an impact. How many people are out there that want Injustice, don't own a PS3/360/Wii U already, and would choose the more expensive Wii U as their console to play it on? Monster Hunter could have some impact, but it didn't make a huge splash in Japan and it will be competing with the 3DS version. If we compare it to the Wii version, after 7 weeks in Japan, it is at 20.8% of Tri. If the same holds true for the west, that would give it about 71k in the west over 5 weeks. Rayman, again, maybe a small bump, but it isn't a very big series. Lego City is probably the best shot at selling some systems, but it won't be out in Japan I believe, and will have only about a month in Europe for the time we are looking at.
All of these things are coming late in the period we are looking at, and none of them are sure fire massive system sellers. Whenever ioi gets around to updating the numbers, it will be two weeks. We know sales were down in Japan, and they didn't look to be improving in PAL countries. The next week there is Hokuto Musou 2 in Japan which might do something, but there is nothing in the west until Rayman at the end of February.
